As we’ve all seen from time to time in articles or posts online, there’s a lot of people worried about the negative effects of social media on our generation, and how it’s taking over our lives. I agree with a lot of these sentiments, and actually also believe that social media may play too large of a part in our everyday lives these days. This is why I’ve decided to take a break from certain social media outlets this summer, and deleted the Facebook, Twitter, and Snapchat apps from my phone. However, I also think a lot of us ignore the positives that social media brings to our lives, other than just as a mechanism to entertain us when we’re bored. So I decided to spend some time this last week observing the positive effects of social media on my life, as well as the negatives. I think I’ve now come to an informed conclusion about what type of impact social media culture truly has on our lives.

Social media outlets, being advanced in the way they are today, are something that’s considered somewhat new to our world. Being able to communicate several messages within the same minute with someone across the entire world isn’t a privilege that our parents had. Even fifty years ago, when our parents were born, you had to send a handwritten letter through “snail mail” if you wanted to communicate with someone in another country, or even another state.

I think, in this way, social media is a huge positive innovation for our society. Living in different country than a friend no longer means you’ll never talk to them. In fact, some of us are closer with people we only communicate with through our social media than we are with our next door neighbors. I can name so many people my parents have found online that they knew in high school, and reconnected with through Facebook. Now, we can keep tabs on all of our friends all over the country and the world just by checking our Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, or Twitter apps. I love being able to check my Snapchat and seeing what my friends from New York are up to everyday, and sharing what I’m up to day to day with all of my friends across the country.

However, what comes with this new network of connections, profiles, likes, and followers, is also a new perception of communication and relationships, as well as your image of yourself. We no longer create our self-image based off of our interactions in person, but rather our comparison of our own profile to the profile of our followers. We check Snapchat to see what everyone else is up to, and update our stories to make sure everyone knows how awesome whatever we’re doing is. We post Instagram pictures hoping that people will get a glimpse into our seemingly glamorous lives, or at least that’s how it looks through our feed. We then proceed to spend all day stalking other peoples’ profiles and wishing our lives were more like theirs.

In this way, we are expressing our self-image through a feed of tweets or pictures, and comparing that image to the profiles of other people, which we assume to be a summation of their image. We are defining ourself through other peoples’ perception of us.

In my opinion, this is where social media culture becomes destructive. We post with the hope that people will look at our lives with the same awe and admiration that we look at other peoples’ feeds with. We want more attention, more likes, more followers to see what we post. We allow our followers to define our image.

This is why I’ve personally decided to take a break for the summer. I’m tired of being worried about what everyone else is up to and who’s doing what with who; instead, I want to focus on separating myself from my social media and living my life on my own. I want to be able to create my own happiness, and determine my own quality of life without drawing that happiness from a comparison to other peoples’ experiences. Why can’t we all just experience our own lives and stop worrying so much about everyone else’s?

Now, you may be wondering what I think about social media then, since I’ve pointed out some really great positives and some harmful negatives of the culture it’s created. So in conclusion, I think social media is a great network and a great tool, if we use it correctly. It can provide us with wonderful opportunity to stay connected with the lives of our friends and family that we don’t see everyday, as well as expose us to information that we otherwise wouldn’t have seen. However, as soon as we start using it to define our self-image and compare ourselves to others on these outlets, it becomes a destructive and harmful culture.

I challenge everyone to reflect on themselves: when you post a picture or tweet, do you do it to define yourself through other peoples’ perception of you and your feed? Or do you do it to share your life and experiences with the people you care about, just as you hope they’ll do with you? As long as we’re aware and careful about our motivation behind our posts, social media can have a huge positive impact on our lives, and keep us informed about the world around us, as well as connected with the people we care about.