It’s easy to think we know someone we follow on social media, right? We see posts with friends and with family. We see status updates about their dog. We see where they spent their Friday night. We see what they had for brunch last weekend. But, though many people want to believe they know about someone’s life from meaningless Internet posts, we honestly know nothing about someone we follow on social media.

We don’t really know who they are and how they feel. We don’t know where they came from and what they’ve seen. We can’t know someone’s past experiences through a computer screen—how he or she felt in that fleeting moment. Just because a person has a large social media following doesn’t mean he or she is happy. It doesn’t mean that person feels appreciated or loved. You could have over a million followers on Instagram, but who is it that you call when you leave the library on a rainy Friday night?

It’s interesting to see where the line between a person’s personal life and his or her life on the Internet is drawn—what he or she chooses to share with those outside of his or her personal life. What people who are obsessed with social media fail to realize is that when you turn off your device and look around, there you find the people who play an important role in your life. It’s easy to forget about the world around us when we are tapped into our cell phone or computer. But what happens if you lose service? What happens when there is no Wi-Fi and no cellular reception?

When you are a child, you don’t have a social media account. You don’t have a false perception of yourself or an image to live up to. You don’t feel compelled to share pictures of you and your friends with other people instead of truly being present in that moment with them. You create meaningful and lasting relationships instead of relationships with very shallow origins. Social media has created a second world in its own right with access to billions of people—a world where we can escape the frustration of small town living and familiar faces. However, we shouldn’t perceive social media as a zero-sum game. We shouldn’t give ourselves over to social media entirely.

Look around and ask yourself who those closest to you are. With which individuals in your life would you choose to spend a week without your cell phone? Those people are the most important individuals in your life. Don’t let social media fool you. It is in creating physical relationships, that we truly experience what it means to be human. Our ancestors did it for thousands of years, and we can too. We shouldn’t lose touch with others on a personal level in favor of the convenience and accessibility of the online world. You can have millions of people following you on the social media and also be the loneliest person in the world.