I read an article recently about a young athlete from UPenn who committed suicide last year. I had seen an article before about her death but this article was different. It discussed how the family turned to her social media and her friends to help piece together the end of their daughter's life. They wanted answers as to why she took her life, but what they found was that through her social media she did more to mask herself than express herself.
What this article left me thinking was, when did social media become about hiding our true self instead of expressing it? Is social media to blame for our generations lack of self worth?
Our generation is growing up in a time where one click stands between us and letting all of our followers sneak a peek at our lives. We have Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Snapchat, and so on, where we can construct our lives in a way that we want the world to perceive us. We look at magazine covers of celebrity's with flawless skin and golden tans so we turn to photo editors to smooth out our blemishes and tint our skin before we post it on Instagram. The photo editing applications that are available can take someone's body and shave off their hips, their scars, and their self identity in one click. Why is it that we have to filter every image that we put out there of ourselves? With each of these applications they provide multiple filters for us to put on our photos before we post them, perpetuating the idea that everyone needs to be “enhanced" before showing themselves to their followers.
Photos have gone from being about capturing a moment to projecting a false reality. The reason people feel so inclined to post photos with their teeth whitened, skin smoothed out, and their eyes glowing blue is because through social media we compete with each other. We see how many “likes" we get as marker of self value. I will be the first to admit that if I do not get 100 likes on an Instagram post, I keep checking back until I do. My boyfriend thinks I am crazy! I know people that if they do not get a certain amount of “likes" they will delete the picture all together. The reasoning behind this is not about the actual number of likes but it is the fact that they do not want others to see the lack of likes and judge them because of that. They feel inadequate and insecure if the number does not exceed 100. The problem with this is it is just a stupid picture! It is suppose to taken to bring you back to a moment in time not as a way to boost or deflate your self confidence.
Not only do we judge ourselves through social media, but we judge others as well. Everyone has looked at a photo or a post and thought “oh god why would she ever post that!" We see someone's photo and criticize every little thing about it from the background to the freckle on their nose. God forbid the picture is a little blurry or the girls in it show too much cleavage. We have a field day over that! Our generation is our toughest critic. We hold ourselves and others to impossible standards on our social media and often forget that what we see on our phones and on these sites is not reality.
We compare ourselves to other just as much as we criticize them. We look at each other's photos and say “ugh she has the best life" yet again forgetting that it is just a picture. Comparing oneself to another is one of the surest ways to be unhappy.
We sit around staring at our phones thinking this is reality. We “check-in" on Facebook that we are at a five star hotel just so that our “friends" can look at it and be jealous. We post selfies with our makeup looking like we are heading for the red carpet even though we are just sitting in our bedroom. We Snapchat scenes of a party so it looks like we are having a good time. We are all looking at life through filter lenses so that when something as real as a death occurs we have nothing to look back on besides those falsities.
With this in mind I challenge all of you, just as much as I challenge myself, to post that picture of you with no filter, to stop taking pictures for the sake of “likes" but instead for the sake of saving a memory so that years from now you can look back and remember that day and that experience you had. We need to go back to using social media sites as a way to go back to a time and place not to show off what we did on saturday night. I am not saying we should all stop posting cute Instagrams with our friends. I am simply saying to do it for the right reasons. Do it for yourself, and be yourself. Let's go back to using social media as a form of self expression and not as a way of self concealment.
