With prom season officially in full swing, I find myself constantly refreshing my Facebook for the latest on what dresses people wore, how people decided to do their hair and what their dates looked like. I'm never worried that I won't find enough photos, though, because I can rely on girls adding upwards 100 the morning after prom. Today, I've found myself rifling through photos of girls I went to high school with, analyzing each photo to see if it looks like they had a good time.
I realized while I was doing it, though, that I do the same thing with photos of girls in college. I'll spend an hour or two of my Sunday looking through photos girls have posted of the weekends they've had. I'll look at their outfits, their locations, the fun they all seemingly had, and find myself getting unnecessarily jealous. It doesn't matter how much fun I may have had that weekend, because I always find myself envying someone else's life.
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But why? Why do we care so much about people we hardly know and high school kids we haven't seen in more than two years that are now posting their prom pictures? When I started my Facebook account, all I was interested in was using it to show others how great my life was — the things I was doing, the people I was meeting and the places I was going. And everyone does that to an extent, especially with Instagram, where all it is is pictures to show you what your life could be like, as seen through your friends' photographs.
We are obsessed with pictures because we want to create an image for ourselves. We see ourselves in a certain light, and we want people to see us in that light, too. We want people to want to live our lives, just as I'm sure many of us have been guilty of going through someone's photos and wondering why we can't have theirs.
In reality, there will never be a way for me to stop wondering what it's like to live in someone else's shoes. Even if I were to delete my Facebook, my Instagram and my Twitter, I would still find ways to compare myself to the lives of my friends and the people I've known for years. While I wish I could say it's easy to do, using my Facebook less has been one of the best things I've done. I feel better about myself, more confident in my abilities and my appearance, and above all, I feel more satisfied with the life I've created for myself. While I'll still post photos in hopes that people from my past will see how well I'm doing, I always try and remember the real reason I took the photo in the first place: to preserve the memories I'm making, so that I can look back on them years from now and remember how great I knew my life to be at the time.
