As I scroll through my Instagram feed or look at the “explore” page on the app, I see picture after picture of gorgeous girls and nice cars and houses and people on awesome vacations. I awe over people who have nicer clothes than me or a nicer body or hair and I begin to compare my life to them. I think to myself “should I have those clothes?” “Why can’t I have that really expensive car?” “Should I go buy that designer bag because all of mine are outdated?”
I know that this sounds awful, but these pictures are what have caused a lot of people to feel bad about themselves and compare themselves to others rather than being appreciative of what they have. Imagine a young girl who is raised by a single parent who is living pay check to pay check and she’s wearing the clothes from her older sister and can barely afford to go out to a movie with her friends on the weekends. As she scrolls through Instagram and sees a girl her age flaunting a designer outfit and spending her weekend at the beach and posting pictures, she is going to compare herself to this girl and wonder why her life can’t be like hers. This causes so many people to feel bad about their lives, and what she doesn’t know is that same girl in the designer outfit looks at pictures of someone else driving a fancy car or with someone with a great body and wonders why she can’t be or look more like them.
It’s a vicious cycle, and what people need to realize is these people are only highlighting the highest parts of their lives on their account, and they too are envious of someone else’s “life” that they see on social media. People don’t show the negative parts of their lives on social media, because no one wants to see the aspects of your life of you fighting with your boyfriend or your money problems, so people get this false idea that they will be happier if their life is more like that person they saw on their news feed. We constantly comment on pictures “goals” or “I wish I had this” whether it be about someone’s relationship, or something materialistic. But in reality, these people go through the same struggles as anyone else, and they’re probably commenting the same things on someone else’s pictures. Instagram and other social media outlets give us this false idea that our lives are not significant unless we have amazing pictures and a bunch of likes. We want people to be impressed by how great our lives are, but instead we create a false life on social media and we compare our social media lives and the realities of our lives to everyone else’s to make sure that we are relevant and that we look like we have the most amazing life to our followers and everyone who looks at our page while we leave out all of the realities.
