Isn’t it sad that we live in a generation in where a person’s worth is determined by how many likes they get on a picture? Recently this topic has been big in the news involving teen Instagram star Essena O’Neill, announcing that she is quitting social media for good. She posted a final video to her YouTube channel explaining how social media is not enhancing her life, but making it worse.

Isn’t it sad that we live in a generation where we have more followers than leaders? We have more people stalking what everyone else is doing so that they can’t even be attuned into what is going on around them. We are puppets, held up by the strings of social media. We have the constant impossible yearning to be perfect. We forget to embrace our imperfections. We forget to embrace what makes us unique.

Isn’t it sad that instead of talking to people we would rather just text them? That we are now known as the generation that gets anxiety over making phone calls? Isn’t it sad that we have overall just stopped caring?

Isn't it sad that we have stopped caring about indulging in the world around us, and only partake in experiences in order to take a picture and upload it for the self-appraisal that comes along with it -- to show others what we are doing, in order to get praise, attention, and compliments? We are so in tuned to our selfies that we could care less about how others are feeling, because even when we are in a room with them our phones are still in our hands.

Photo via Logical Mynd

We are caring less and less per day. And I just wanted to enforce the idea that we are more than the number of followers, likes, comments, and views we receive on a screen. That everyone’s life can be enhanced using social media, and that if you base someone’s life simply on their Instagram page, you are really only seeing half of that person. That people use Photoshop, and spend hours retaking pictures over and over again until they get the perfect one to post. That some of us spend hours deciding between Valencia and Hefe filters on Instagram deciding which one looks better on our photo. Imagine what we could be doing with all of this time.

Imagine what we could experience with all of this time that we put into social media, what skills we could gain, what new things we could try. What we could be doing with our own lives instead of obsessing over someone else’s “perfect life.” Imagine all the organizations we could join, food we could try, and places we could go.

Also, I want you to notice how I am using we.

This is due to the fact that I of course am also a contributor to this problem too. Lately I have found myself somewhat addicted to posting on social media. I know, crazy, right? How can someone be addicted to social media? However, it is possible due to the fact that when you receive attention, or a nice comment, or even praise within your social media outlets, it actually starts a small chemical reaction (dopamine) in your brain. This chemical reaction literally causes you to feel happiness. Social media also has a very contradicting effect of making you feel more interconnected with other people, when in reality, it is actually doing quite the opposite. So I’m challenging you and me both to use our social media for good -- for information, not attention -- and to stop it from consuming our lives.