The current climate of our society encourages us to love others before we love ourselves.
We’re in the midst of a technological boom, any given person tends to spend more time preoccupied by an altered reality, rather than the beautiful world right before our eyes. We all recognize the feeling of scrolling through social media and seeing ourselves trapped in a still image of everything that we’ve fallen short of in our own lives. We make broad generalizations after broad generalization of someone’s life with only a single snapshot of pseudo-evidence to back up any sort of claim.
Living on the crux of such breakthroughs in communication facilitates the human desire to both reach out and be heard. As innately social creatures, it's undeniable that we're driven towards what's considered ‘acceptable’ in our culture. We’re provided a pre formed social roll that's seemingly much more beneficial to step into than to not. It starts to feel like our lives are structured by the mundane, everyday average as a result of being bombarded with images of everyone else’s highlight reel.
The media falls under the jurisdiction of large corporations and one of their biggest business strategies regards our very self worth. Commercials tell us exactly what’s wrong with us, then offer us a new, shiny, marked-up solution to help fix it. Even when you think you’ve hand picked exactly what’s in your media diet, algorithms and advertisers sneak material onto your screens in order to satisfy an agenda.
Social media in particular facilitates a culture of comparison and complaints. The tendency of people has become to exclusively showcase polar extremes in their lives, often in the form of political Facebook rants or beach selfies. We only see everything that’s wrong in the world and the people that seem perfectly fine despite it. Businesses will continue to push to keep us as dissatisfied economic objects, but what would happen if we just don’t buy into it?
This phenomenon has made it particularly difficult for millennials to maintain a positive inner voice, as we’re the first generation to be brought up directly under the media’s shadow. We're being pushed to succeed by our parent's generation while the news is showing us statistics that suggest that I may never own a home.
Despite the fact that we’re driven to be successful members of society on top of satisfying relationships with other people, it’s even more crucial to put in in effort of maintaining a healthy relationship with ourselves. At the end of the day, your own thoughts are what ultimately resonates.
In order to overlook what we aren’t, we must focus on everything that we are. Basic psychology explains that our brains will recognize something better if we are actively looking for it. By constantly tearing yourself down with your dissatisfactions, you may be signing away more than your own happiness.
By continuing on in this mind state, one risks projecting their own self-deprecated image on the world until they are ultimately waiting to fall short. Recognizing the fortunes in someone else’s life without diminishing your own self worth is often difficult to achieve, however by practicing to regularly focus on what you are happy about in your life will pull you out of the headspace of fault-finding and land you right where you need to be.
To forgive yourself for an inevitable shortcoming and moving on with optimism is as valuable a life skill as any other. Work towards treating yourself as you would a sibling. No matter what harsh contempt and cruel words you may have shared as children, as you become more inclined to their pride and accomplishments, time will bring out your hidden affections.
Remind yourself of what makes your life extraordinary, encourage yourself that things will turn out okay when all seems lost. At the end of the day, how you view yourself is the only opinion that matters.
