"What's on your mind?" asks Facebook in a friendly tone. This is an open invitation to share your thoughts and feelings to those who you chose to stay in touch with in your life. It is innocuous enough, but as soon as your words are public, your friends are presented with an option to "like" them. Not to offer a message or critique, but to merely say, "this pleases me." It is a strange concept to vote on the expression of another person like Caesar before a gladiator. The icon itself is a thumbs up. Yet it has rapidly become an integral part of modern life in the few years that it has been around. Like many things new and technological, few seem to question its merit and blindly accept its place in life once Facebook decrees it so. Like some benevolent grandmother, Facebook must know what's best for us.

Comments and replies online are a natural way to communicate -- they form a digital dialogue much like a conversation you would have in person. But when was the last time your friend simply held up a sign to show approval of one of your ideas? It's unnatural and unhealthy to communicate to one another in such a binary fashion. We have invented hundreds of languages with millions of words to convey our thoughts, but at heart, we seem to say, this all boils down to a simple metric. Most of our thoughts and feelings are now shared over the Internet though a dizzying array of social media services that all feature some form of "liking." When we know that whatever we present faces this judgment, it makes us select what we choose to say about ourselves. Suddenly everyone becomes a carefully calculated and ideal version of themselves.

This system quantifies our lives and reduces whatever media you may chose to share or thought you may have into a number. This destroys the nuances that practically any original insight has to offer. Facebook, Instagram, and the like may appear to be incredible new vehicles for self-expression thanks to the digital age, but they're massively squandering their potential. Hell, if any article I write has the chance to tank by this measurement, it changes what I may chose to write about. Popular opinion becomes encouraged and our monitors become echo chambers.

This ability to quantify also enables us to better compare our lives to others. If you don't have as many followers, likes, etc, as someone else, you must be personally lacking in some way. When you start seeking validation from others for your thoughts and experiences, you start to live your life not by how you want but what you think others will want. I don't mean to claim myself above any of this. I participate in it as much as anyone else, and maybe I shouldn't. Yet it has always struck me as bizarre that we never question this social experiment we have all unknowingly signed up for. We are only a few years into it but I believe we are probing something old and deep in our psyche. All that being said, please like this article so that I can feel comforted by knowing there are others out there who feel the same.