I’ve heard it, you’ve heard it, we’ve all heard it: Kids these days only care about their smart phones and social media. We can’t stay off our phones long enough for a real conversation. And maybe if we fretted less over our Instagram followings, we’d have enough time for more productive activities.
Look, I’ll be the first to admit that I waste a lot (and I do mean a lot) of my time refreshing my network feeds. But if you think that I—along with the rest of my generation—want that for ourselves, you’re dead wrong.
Social media kinda sucks. Actually, social media really sucks. It’s all just a competition of who can make their life look the most exciting. It’s a constant game of making yourself appear happy and more fulfilled while seeing others’ projections of their own fulfillments in life and then despairing over how your life is seen in comparison. And the saddest, most basic truth of the matter is that it’s all a lie. Every single bit of it.
Think with me for a moment. We take fifteen pictures before we can deem just one of them worthy of a social media post. Once we’ve chosen our picture, we spend forever choosing the best filter, editing the brightness and color (usually in a way that makes our skin look better) and coming up with a creative, fun caption that we then revise several times in order to make it seem as effortless and clever as possible. You may have exchanged only a few words with that friend you graduated with, but your Insta post makes it seem as if the two of you were catching up for hours. It’s an open floor—your own, personal stage. You can make your life appear any way you want it to.
I can’t count how many times I’ve seen someone in real life after having seen him or her on Instagram and being absolutely shocked out how, in actuality, they are not at all the person I thought they were. It’s easy to do that. Social media doesn’t see your problems. It doesn’t see your heartache or your loneliness or the breakout of your face. When I scroll down a feed, I see pretty, happy, smiling, people doing really fun things with their really fun friends.
But, if everyone’s lives are really this fantastic, where’s the evidence for the sharp increase in the diagnosis of anxiety and depression in our generation over the past ten years?
I don’t understand it. Why do we want everyone to think that our lives are perfect when we know oh-so-well that they’re not? And why do we keep believing the lie that we ourselves are telling when we assume that others’ lives are perfect based solely on what they portray online?
We all hate what social media does to us. We fear being left out, so we keep going back to the sources that make us feel more left out than anything else. We hate feeling insecure, so we keep going back to the places that make us feel the most insecure. It’s a never-ending cycle of hurt.
I have a challenge for us. And this includes me, because I am as guilty of all of this as anyone else. Let’s stop playing into the game of social media. Let’s find our personal value in greater things, in the version of us that exists in actuality rather than online. And let’s stop believing the lie that everyone else’s lives are perfect.
Because we know firsthand how un-perfect our own lives are.
