Social media has strongly influenced how I feel about myself. since I was a little girl scrolling through DisneyChannel.com pictures, I have compared myself to them endlessly. This has caused years of emotional and psychological damage that still today, in my college years, haunts me every time I look in the mirror. The inferiority complex is becoming ever more prevalent in our society and that’s all due in part to its agitator – social media. Unfortunately, my childhood story is not uncommon. In fact, many of the girls in my generation can share similar tales. Whether we like it or not, social media has permeated into our psyches and has contributed greatly to our opinion of ourselves.
Companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat are the largest social media outlets in the world. These networks have grown from friendly startups to enormous domains that encompass many of our relationships and daily communications today. They allow the user to post heavily edited pictures to a timeline of their life and construct the perfect caption to describe their perfect day. They also allow the user to scroll through an endless amount of other perfectly doctored pictures and their perfect witty captions. Now don’t get me wrong, I love these outlets of amusement, but I take them always with a grain of salt. They have helped me stay in contact with countless friends and family members, and have taken my networking ability to the next level. Unfortunately though, they do a lot more harm than good. Our lifestyle of constantly virtually comparing yourself to an unobtainable photograph is toxic to our society. We are caught in a vicious cycle of damaging comparisons that lower our self-worth, cause riffs in our relationships, and ultimately dictate much of our lives. Through each filter we use and every staged photograph we produce, we are getting further away from our genuine selves, and this is detrimental to our society.
Many people today are addicted to these social outlets, and as a country, the problem is just beginning. After working in a summer camp this year, I was stunned to learn that almost all of the youngest children (ages 5-9) knew how to turn on electronics, download applications, snap selfies, and even post photos. Most of the time, they didn’t even need my phone, they just pulled out their own! It is an alarming fact that these young impressionable minds are already absorbing our culture of documenting our life instead of living it. If they continue down this road, they will become dependent upon the amount of likes their selfie receives before they even finish elementary school.
No one can argue about the hold that social media has upon our lives. We are addicts. We need to revert back to the time when we appreciated life as it was in the moment, and didn’t try to compete with each other by capturing every second. Take a minute, put your phone down, look around, and just live. I was able to identify my problem, and I am working hard every day to accept myself for who I am in real life, not in my digital footprint. I no longer care about the filters of the photo, or the amount of fake “likes” it receives overnight, but instead, I focus on the memory I’m creating while it was being taken or the happiness I felt smiling behind the lenses. So stop being so hard on yourself in the technological world and in the real world. Form actual human relationships and utilize social media sparingly, not as your main mode of communication. I promise, you will not regret it.
