"Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many,
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet,"
-T.S. Eliot, 1922
Perhaps T.S. Eliot was right in his depiction of man. In fact, he was spot on. We are zombies of a new age. We're hollow people. I am. You are. Everyone is. We have a lot in common with zombies. Zombies don't have conversation. They don't eat food. They don't care about the other zombies; they're in it for themselves.
We, as a society, have an addiction. It's not drugs, alcohol, or sex; it's Instagram, Twitter, Facebook. We don't talk to each other anymore. We tweet, text, DM, you name it. We don't eat our food because we're too busy posting pictures of it. We really don't care that our friends don't like they way they look in a picture. As long as I look good, you can guarantee it's going to be plastered all over our social media accounts. I know I'm guilty of it.
We're all so obsessed with making sure others see our lives as we wish they were, that we're editing and filtering our lives as they go by.
As a society, we have become too conceited. Success is now defined as likes on our pictures, or the favorites on our tweets. Social media has become our crutch, and because of this, we are shallow. We need it to feel validated. I can testify to this. I was the person to delete a picture if it didn't get a certain amount of likes.
A year ago, I lived in my own little world. I was so self-involved that the only thing I cared about was how many likes I got or how many people retweeted me. I spent more time taking pictures of what I was doing than enjoying it and living in the moment. Of course, at the time I wouldn't have said I was narcissistic. Who would?
But then life happened, and I had better things to worry about than letting everyone know about the very authentic croissants I had for breakfast. I was forced to take a step back and see how conceited I'd grown to be.
Addicts don't quit cold turkey. You know that. I wasn't ready to drop off the face of the earth and delete all of my social media, but I was ready to be less vain. It started out with Twitter, then Tumblr, Snapchat, and Instagram. I kept my Facebook account for the sake of keeping up with family. I went 10 months with no social media (albeit with one exception). Ten months of not caring that nobody knew what I was doing at any given time. I was in solitude and I wasn't. I found that I definitely like going to live concerts better than watching them through on my Snapchat story hours after the encore ends. Also, food tastes a lot better when you're not so busy taking pictures of it.
You can find me on social media once again--but followers, likes, and retweets aren't a priority. It's okay if you don't like my selfie on Instagram; I was just feeling myself. I saw past the brown fog and came to an important realization. Our self-validation doesn't need to be through social media; validation comes from within oneself.
We're just a bunch of people who are letting life pass us by. There will always be some people will rely on social media to make themselves feel good. If you're one of those people, I feel sorry for you, but there is a way out. You deserve better. When we can stop letting social media define our self-worth, we will no longer be one of T.S. Eliot's hollow people.
