When you take a selfie, how long does it take you? It can be hard work. You have to get the perfect angle to get the perfect lighting and make the “duck” face so that your lips look perfectly plump. It hurts your hand after a while as well as making our lips sore. Why do we go through all of this? So that we look perfect (and to look like Kim Kardashian). We all want people to see us in a certain light. We tweet, Instagram, Snapchat, or change our profile picture to the cutest picture we can find of ourselves, but that is still not enough.

What I see my friends posting about college on social media is completely different from what they tell me it is actually like. They can look like they are having the times of their lives at a party, but that same week they failed an exam or got in a fight with their roommate. Why is our society obsessed with how we look on social media? It used to be that we just obsessed over how we looked in person, but now it has gone digital. It is more than looking good for our friends and feeling better about ourselves. We want to believe what we post. We want to be the person we post pictures of, as well as other people we see on social media, such as celebrities. But, is what we post who we actually are? Deception on social media is more common than most people think or realize. When people post a picture, it is not always a true reflection of who they truly are or how they feel in that moment.

Why don’t we change that? We should stop wanting to be our posts and just be ourselves. We are not a filtered image, nor are our lives a filtered image. We are messy, confused, terrified, sad, happy, sarcastic, and everything in the middle, so why filter that? We should not feel the need to filter our pictures and posts to fit an image we think people want us to be. We are a generation of social media and that is okay, but what is not okay is us using it to mask our flaws and who we truly are. We want to believe our lives are perfect because when we look at other people’s social media profiles, they look like they have interesting lives compared to our boring ones. What we do not realize is that those same people we idolize on social media are posting images or tweets to look a certain way to people, which is not always how they are in real life. I think what people have to ask themselves is: are we controlling social media or is it controlling us?