Dear Generation,

I hope you are doing well today! The weather is getting warmer, the sun is shining (maybe), and school is coming to a finish line soon. I'd like to talk about social media with you. So get buckle up and sit down for five minutes, and really read this article.

When I was in middle school, social media began to blow up. Instagram had just begun, YouTube started growing, and Kik Messenger was the hottest app to chat with your friends. Things were simpler back then. People posted selfies that might make them cringe today, and others posted dramatic quotes to come off as "hipster" or "artsy." It didn't matter as much as to what people posted back then. If you got 10 likes on a picture, you thought you were "popular" or "cool."

I was one of those kids.

I tried my best to get likes and people to follow me from school. I thought the more followers I had, the better I would feel. This is also when I began making YouTube videos, so I thought the more followers I would have on Instagram and all the jazz would really help my subscriber amount. I feel pretty stupid now looking back on that.

Take it to the beginning of high school, and Twitter began to blow up. Memes were created, funny twitter posts went viral, and getting the most favorites and retweets became the new thing. As time goes on, social media drags on our generation to get sucked into this virtual world of followers, retweets, and likes. Those things make us feel special on the inside. Nowadays, if people don't get a certain amount of likes, they'll question their post or themselves. If a tweet doesn't get many favorites or retweets, we start to overthink over nothing. If a video on YouTube doesn't get a certain amount of views or likes, we question our creativity and ideas.

Maybe not everyone feels this way, but I felt that way for a while. I always felt the need to post all the time on Instagram to get people to notice me, or make a funny tweet to seem "relatable." Recently I realized that the whole thing is bullshit.

All that FOMO (fear of missing out) and "popularity" stuff is garbage. The other day I unfollowed a lot of people on Instagram and Twitter because I don't talk to them anymore, or we were never really friends, to begin with. Two years ago, I wouldn't have done that because I was afraid of losing followers. Yes, I still did lose some followers, but it doesn't matter as much to me anymore because social media isn't always reality.

Teenagers these days assume that they have to have fancy phones and show off all their "glamour" online with everyone, even if half of their followers don't even know them. It's an escape from what reality is. On Instagram, you're not going to post a picture of yourself crying because you're depressed about something. You're going to post a cute selfie instead to make people think you're doing alright or that you're cute or whatever the case may be. Some people might do that just to get attention, but most people wouldn't.

I came to the realization that the number of followers or likes I receive don't define me as a person or how happy I should be. I post stuff because I like to take pictures or because I want to share a story with the people who genuinely follow me. I follow people because I'm either friends with them, they're my family, they're a celebrity, or I genuinely want to know how this person is doing from high school.

I stopped following some people because, to be frank, I didn't really know them that well or I didn't really care about them, to begin with. I don't mean that to sound harsh, but it's true. I feel so much better not having all these posts come up on my feed from some person I barely knew in high school. It's not important to me.

Social media is set to get us into this idea that our status matters to everyone. Honestly, I don't care what people think of my "status." I'm a college kid going on in life who doesn't even know what his own status is in society. I post what I want to post because I either: 1) want to share something with people 2) post pictures that I believe are neat or 3) I want to keep it as a form of memorabilia for when I'm older. When I'm grown up and having my own family, I'm not going to care about how many followers or likes I have. I'm going to look at the memories I shared with people throughout my life. That's why I post on Instagram and YouTube. It's to have my own personal scrapbook so I can look at how ridiculous I was or how much fun I had as a kid.

You have 100k followers and you're in high school? Cool. You don't use social media? Cool. Do you use MySpace? Might want to get out from under that rock buddy, but cool.

Retweets, likes, followers, favorites, shares, and all that stuff are just numbers. Yeah, it's cool to have a lot of people follow you because they think you're interesting, or it's insane to have a video go viral online, but sometimes it isn't reality. It doesn't matter how much of that you have. What matters is how you act as a person offline rather than online.

Don't get me wrong I love social media and I think it is a great form of getting the news and staying in touch with people, but it can also be one of our biggest enemies at times. Just remember that.

Keep your head up, and I'll see you guys next time with a new article.

Your Friend,

Al