"Beep, beep, beep!" The sound of my alarm wakes me up in the morning and the first thing I instinctively do is reach for my phone. I unlock it with my fingerprint and open up the Twitter app. Before even brushing my teeth and washing my face, I've already delved into the deep, dark abyss that is ruining our lives: social media.
Smartphones and technology have made access to the internet too easy today. Of course, there's no problem with a few harmless posts, but it becomes an issue when we let it take over our lives. Social media can certainly be beneficial, but at the same time it has provided our generation with some major problems.
Whether it's good or bad, the internet is permanent. We're always told to be careful with what we post on social media because a potential employer may find it. It's not a big deal to post a picture of you and your dog on #NationalDogDay, but no one wants (or should) read your rant of angry tweets about a boy or pictures of you blackout drunk at a party. Word gets around the internet and just because something has been deleted doesn't meant it's gone forever.
We measure our popularity by how many views our Snapchat story gets or how many Instagram likes our latest picture at the pumpkin patch has gotten. Everything on social media is somewhat of a competition. Who can get the most likes, shares or comments We spend so much time preparing the perfect post just to impress people we barely know.
Nowadays, people want you to think they're having more fun than they actually are. We post pictures of parties and sporting events and vacations because we want to show our followers how much of a blast we had. For the most part, people share the positives of their life on social media. It seems like everyone has their life figured out when they're posting about their new job or new fiancee. We don't see whatever issues people are dealing with on a day to day basis. Social media makes it so easy to feel left out and like we're the only ones not doing something "fun", and that can really screw up our happiness.
