In this day and age, social media is everything. It practically consumes our young lives. Popularity is defined by the amount of followers you have on Twitter and attractiveness is defined by the amount of likes you get on your latest Instagram selfie. The amount of Facebook friends you have equals the amount of real friends you have and the amount of Twitter followers you have defines how important your voice is. But is this the way it really should be?

We live in a time where relationships are determined by whether or not your spouse makes you their “woman crush Wednesday” and if something is not documented by a picture, people actually question whether it happened or not. Love is defined by the amount of Instagram posts your significant other makes for you and the captions, well, they are even more important.

We spend countless hours uploading photos and videos to our Snapchat stories trying to make our lives look anything less than thrilling, only for these images to be erased 24 hours later. The assumption becomes that if you are doing something exciting it will be in your story, so essentially if you have not posted something on your story you clearly don’t have a life. When in actuality, the people who are not posting things on their stories are the ones who are actually out there experiencing life.

I even find myself week to week constantly checking the amount of shares a particular article of mine gets and deciding whether or not an article was good based on the shares. Sometimes, I spend weeks working on an article for it to amass less than 100 shares, other times I find myself winging it the night before and receiving over 1,000 shares. I find it funny that I then assume that an article is more valuable versus less valuable based on the amount of shares it gets. So the article that I spent less than an hour on is clearly more valuable than the one I spent 3 weeks on, right? Wrong.

Don’t get me wrong I LOVE social media, in fact, I might even work in social media post grad. However, I think society needs to take a step back and realize that social media is an act. A person can make their life out to be anything they want it to be on social media. Trust me, that person who you cyber stalk does not have nearly as thrilling of a life as they make it out to be. And if we keep spending countless hours perfecting our social media personas we are truly missing out on what this world has to offer. So next time you begin to obsess over your lack of Instagram followers, just remember, in the grand scheme of things social media is not all that important after all.