We've all become obsessed with “the like”: overly editing, adding filters, timing our posts, spending an exorbitant amount of time thinking of creative captions. We post pictures that don’t look like ourselves. Our captions don’t tell good stories—we are putting up a facade of who we actually are on social media. What about posting pictures that show a genuine laugh? Or that picture that shows a little too much double chin? How about that picture that is low quality but depicts a high quality time? Why are we so afraid of being our unedited, untouched, true selves on social media?
I was once victim to the overly filtered Instagram. I once would send my pictures to five different friends to get their approval. I once spent more time thinking of a good caption than I would studying for a quiz. The struggle for the likes was real. I was posting pictures of how I wanted others to perceive me. I was then introduced to the “finstagram,” or “fake-Instagram”. It allowed me to post pictures that weren’t edited, that were of terrible quality, that told an awesome story. I was posting pictures that made me laugh, I posted pictures that made me smile thinking about the story behind the picture—but the most important thing was, I did not care about how many “likes” I got.
If you think about it, when you scroll through your social media feed, are you consciously “liking” most of the content? How many times have you mindlessly scrolled through your feed? We are all at fault of “liking” posts that have no meaning to us. Do we really like what we are “liking?” The truth is, social media falsely leads us to believe that we are the center of everyone's lives. We post things on Instagram that people forget about within a few minutes, our status updates on Facebook are easily neglected and our Twitter feed is packed with 140 character blurbs of nonsense. We need to stop taking social media so seriously.
Post content that makes you laugh out loud, be yourself on social media. There are too many times where people use social media as a shield—they hide their true selves behind heavily edited posts. Sometimes it’s not all about the like. If you had a quality time with the people you care about, that is all that should matter. I have found myself become more conscious of how much I use social media. The most fun memories shared aren’t the ones documented on various social media platforms, but the ones that need to be retold. It’s more about living in the moment than anything. Social media stops us from living in the moment; the constant need to share everything on social media inhibits us from looking up. Look up from those screens! Have genuine times with your friends. In the end, those likes mean nothing, it’s just a double tap on a glass screen.
