Whenever you go through someone's Instagram or Facebook, you'll see photos of them smiling with friends or doing cute poses in front of artsy backgrounds. When you look at someone's feed, you must think they're living the perfect life and they're doing just fine. That's not always true though, is it?
Being a catfish basically means having an alternate persona. Quite frankly, we all have alternate personas we show to our friends or followers on social media. We use filters to make the dull lighting in our picture look better. We take hundreds of photos only to take hours to find the perfect one to post online. As humans, we thrive on making ourselves look put together and getting all those likes and comments under our photos. We thrive on admiration from our peers.
In the end, we are all some sort of catfish. Whether it be on the basis of physical appearance or just overall. The social media platform is there to give us opportunities to show our friends and everyone in the world how great our lives are. And sure, our lives are great. But you'll never see someone post themselves looking sad in a photo. You'll never see someone post something that makes them look disappointed. Anything that strays from our online alternate persona, we won't post. It's as simple as that.
As I mentioned earlier, this comes from the fact that we want admiration. We cannot receive admiration if we post anything that makes us seem unhappy or unsatisfied with life. You might think the girl that travels all over the world, has the perfect bikini body, and smiles so brightly in all her photos has no problems or insecurities. You are definitely wrong.
Even if someone posts on their Snapchat story every day and posts an Instagram picture every other day, they still have problems going on in their life. They still have their ups and downs. Sometimes posting and showing others how great their life is can help some cope with their current issues. Or maybe, some people don't even have any issues and they are genuinely enjoying life as much as their social media portrays. Although I believe that is very rare.
Catfishing on social media is real. Nobody wants to post anything that makes themselves look any less than perfect. Maybe our lives are such a mess and social media is the only way we can live that perfect life we wish we had. We feed off the likes and comments and all the attention we receive, whether some admit it or not.
