Imagine a generation that was willing to spend hours of their time to capture their perfect angle, willing to do countless edits to make sure they looked their absolute best even if it was just for one picture that, likely, only a small percentage of people would see. Aren’t they so selfish? Why isn’t anyone calling out these self-centered Victorian era aristocrats? Maybe because they’re all dead, but probably because you thought I was talking about Millennials.
Selfies are often painted as a symptom of the sickness that will “destroy our generation.” While I enjoy the idea that a snapshot of my perfect cat eye is powerful enough to wreak havoc across the world, tearing apart the very fabric that holds our society together, I think some of you may be exaggerating just how many people follow me on Instagram. However, I will agree that selfies do carry a certain power of destruction. In a world full of over edited billboards and increasingly impossible standards of beauty, selfies, along with their subsequent social media sites, have the power to destroy social stigma.
A quick flip through a magazine or a drive down a popular high way will easily reinforce a strict standard of beauty only achievable through the magic of Photoshop. A look through Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat counters that idea. Those are places where I can see a hundred different pictures of a hundred different people, all of which are clearly different from one another, and each of them can be viewed as beautiful. Selfies aren’t destroying society, they’re creating a more diverse and understanding one.
Our generation, for the most part, uses social media to create and strengthen community, but I’m not claiming that that’s why we take selfies. I don’t, and I hope never will, take and post selfies to please the handful of people who might come across it on the internet. I am being selfish when I take pictures of myself and fill my feed with the best ones, but that doesn’t make me, or the act of taking a selfie, evil. There are easily a hundred much more powerful people who are unimaginably selfish. There are some whose selfish decisions really could cause worldwide havoc. Priorities, people.
I digress. My point is, I don’t care that selfies are selfish. Being interested in how I look is not something unique to my generation and it will not destroy us. Every generation has had something unique to them that the previous ones loathed. For some it was excessive drug usage, for others it was disco. Personally, if my generation’s claim to shame is that we loved ourselves just a little more than everyone else did, I’m perfectly okay with that.
So let us be young and selfish in a world that demands we grow up and solve its problems. Let us love ourselves in a society convincing us to hate our own reflection. Just once, let us be unironically, irrevocably, and unjustifiably proud of ourselves simply for existing.
