Coming back to your dorm room after a long day of classes that are unexpectedly difficult, your afternoon probably starts off one of two ways. Maybe you talk to your roommate a little; maybe you beeline straight to the snacks your parents bought for you during move-in weekend (#blessed). What it comes down to, though, is that a) you want a nap or b) you want to chill before you must strike back out into the world as a functional human. If you are not taking a nap, chances are this period of chill time is generally spent on your phone, or rather, social media. This behavior is the modus operandi of most millennials, and who can blame us? More than ever it is equally as important to stay connected as it is to take time to disconnect.
The beginning of each year of college is a crucial time for the relationships in our lives, for maintaining those connections. It is chalked full of seeing people we haven’t seen all summer or meeting people for the first time; it tests those childhood friendships we took for granted. Keeping tabs on the growing number of people you know is a challenge, but it is a challenge made remarkably easier through applications like Instagram and Snapchat, and websites like Facebook and Twitter. Scroll the news feed of Instagram or Facebook and peppered throughout are snapshots of who was hanging out with who, and where someone was a given time. We see all the milestones, a post about going away to school or winning an award. We see the highlight reel, an album of pictures cleverly entitled. Having access to all this information about the people we know is an incredible, unprecedented tool, but if not taken with a grain of salt, it can simultaneously be horribly toxic.
This, of course, is not news to anyone. The fact that social media is not a genuine portrayal of a person’s quality of life is something we all know in the back of our mind, but while lying in bed, stomach down, head propped up on a pillow, exhausted from class, it is easy to forget that a big group of girls posing in a cute photo hardly knows one another, that all that moment is truly indicative of was one girl yelling, “Let’s take a picture for Instagram!” It is hard to self-correct our false assumption that every couple that posts a picture must be so in love, that every extensive snap story of a party does not mean it was actually fun. We know it is not real because as we absorb all this content we are also the perpetrators, curating our accounts to convey our best selves, un-tagging and deleting photos that negate that image. Yet, even with this knowledge, we are envious and competitive, anxious and depressed. I know I have had a few moments clicking through the photos of an event I was not invited to, and it is inevitable to wonder, “What is it about them that makes them better than me?”
I chose the picture I did as the cover photo of this article because it is pretty darn cute -- and we all knew it -- but the night that followed was honestly pretty mediocre, the pregame mostly consisting of taking pictures. If you find yourself in that moment as this school year begins, take consolation in the fact that the only reason you are laying eyes on the photograph in the first place is because everything is just right -- their lighting, their filter, their clothing, their caption, their location – they are something deemed worthy of broadcasting and sharing.
