We have a social media addiction. As a country, we are obsessed. Think about it. How many times a day do you check it on your phone? 4, 5 times, 27? Between the multiple platforms of Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram, you end up spending a lot of time taking in snapshots of other people's seeming beautiful lives.

Social media is the greatest source of fiction in our lives. That's right fiction. Maybe it's not a complete and total lie, but it's still a long way from the truth.

A social media profile is often nowhere near an accurate representation of someone.

Over-filtered, posed Instagram photos, and witty tweets, edited to perfection flood our feeds, and our minds. It's easy to feel like you can't live up to their standards. A simple cup of coffee is filtered for "aesthetic". They crop out everything they don't want you to see. Sadness can be hidden by a smile and a change in brightness. If it says #nofilter it just means they took 40 photos to get it perfect.

Everything is posed, filtered, and cropped to look amazing. No one posts the selfie where they are not "on fleek", or whatever the latest slang is.

I can't tell you how many times I've seen girls pose a perfect photo of them having fun after a breakup with caption about how great the single life is just to post it on Twitter to get back at an ex. A declaration of "I'm fine and moving on." You don't see the tears or how much ice cream she's gone through in the past week.

You can't look at everything wonderful in someone else's life, and be disappointed in your life when the good, the bad, and the normal can't measure up.

With social media you are able to showcase exactly what you want people to see. Maybe instead of posting another "Like this photo for a TBH", we should get more honest with ourselves and with what we are telling the world. Because TBH that girl you envy on Instagram is faking it. Her life is much less perfect from her side of the camera.

Likes have become the currency of the internet. There is so much pressure to have a perfect online presence, but I'm so tired of seeing people too busy perfectly documenting their lives for their followers to actually live it.

I don't hate social media. I like it just as much as everyone else. I think it's a great tool, but it shouldn't become all-consuming.

It's easy to get caught up in the beautiful lives we feature online, but make sure you take some time away as well. Put down the phone. Capture a moment as a memory instead of a photograph. Take down your daily thoughts in a journal instead of posting yet another Facebook status. Spend less time with your followers and more with your friends.

Instead of sharing pieces of our fictionalized present, let's focus on writing the todays and tomorrows of our reality.