Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat; the amplitude of platforms to share your life on is continuously growing. Our generation has become one that feels the need to post on social media all the time, but is it really beneficial?
Facebook has proven to be an amazing platform to find old friends, reconnect, and see what everyone’s been up to. Not to mention, they now have the memories section, which allows you to reminisce. But why do we need so many similar platforms online?
I think the ultimate problem with social media is the desire to show everyone how amazing your life is. As my wise friend once put it, “Snapchat stories always look 100 times more fun than they actually are.”
The world of social media has trained human beings to only show the most amazing parts of their life and make every small moment seem so much more fun than it really is. What happened to just living in the moment?
Why can’t you have a night out with your friends where you just enjoy being with each other? Instead of taking photos of everything to find the perfect one for Instagram or videotaping every dumb thing your friends do, try being in the moment and enjoy who you’re with. Laugh at your friends doing stupid things instead of whipping out your phone and filming them.
Social media makes people project the best versions of themselves and allow the failures and flaws to seem nonexistent. You never see a post on social media about how horrible someone’s life is or a picture of how depressed they are. Only smiles, happiness, and fun; nobody’s life is like that.
People deal with sadness, heartbreak, depression, and anxiety. Everyone deals with these things, so why must we always project a false exterior to the world?
I’m not trying to act like I’m above social media and don’t conform to the norms because I completely do. I post pictures that make my life look so much more exciting and joyful than it is.
My snapchat story is 5 pictures long on a night I go out with my friends, but when I’m having a rough day, or week, or month, my story is bare. I’ve racked and racked my brain, but I have no clue why I do this.
I’ve never been one to care much about what people think of me. I’m the type of girl who would go onstage as a tap-dancing grandpa and have the best time making a complete fool of myself -- and I have done this. So why do I try to create this perfect life online?
My hope would be that we only show happy moments because they are the moments we want to remember and in posting them, we hope to make others smile when they see them, but in reality, I think it’s a much deeper selfishness. It’s a desire to make others feel worse about their own lives because yours looks better. It’s a desire to seek out praise and compliments from others.
It’s a desire to hide the parts of yourself you don’t like.
I wonder what would happen if we shared everything. If we shared the good, the bad, the happy, the horrid, the delight, and the depression. If every problem a person faced or every rough day a person had was projected on social media in the same way as the joyful experiences.
Would our society flourish in helping people through their problems or fail and instead judge others in their vulnerability? Unfortunately, I believe the latter would occur.
