College students live their lives on social media. We live to tweet about our annoying professors, set our Facebook cover photo to a banner encouraging freshmen to rush our sorority, and discuss Instagram captions for the night while getting ready with our roommates. We're constantly scrutinized for "curating" our lives on the Internet: we only show our most flattering angles, our most glamorous nights out, our wittiest thoughts. And why shouldn't we? Why would we post a picture in an outfit we don't find flattering, or tell the Facebook world that we just set a wax appointment?
The problem here is not making our lives look better on social media. It's our attempts to make it look worse. We constantly exaggerate and dramatize every negative aspect of our lives. If we're hungover, we're "ACTUALLY dying in this chem lab right now, send help." If we get soy sauce down the front of our favorite shirt, it's "literally the worst thing to ever happen to anyone ever." We say these things in passing to our friends, and laugh, because we know it really isn't the end of the world. But we take it a step further, and decide to post our musings on the Internet for everyone to see.
It never dawns on us to think that someone out there may be having a genuinely bad day, or even be experiencing the worst day of her life. If something truly awful happens to you, you don't need to see your troubles trivialized by someone on the Internet. By saying that you're going through the worst heartbreak of your life because your cat died, you're comparing your pain to the girl who just posted a touching tribute on the anniversary of her grandmother's death. There is nothing wrong with sharing your pain and heartbreak online, if that is how you choose to grieve: the issue is that we think that the entire world needs to feel sympathy when we stub a toe.
Our words lose all meaning: if you're "experiencing the worst day of your life" because you failed a quiz and cracked your phone screen, you're comparing these minor troubles to something devastating someone you know could be going through right now. I probably do this just as much as or more than any of my peers; I love to whine on Twitter about how "devastating" it is to just barely miss out on a parking spot or how walking to my class on the fourth floor is "literally the most difficult physical challenge any man or woman has ever undertaken." But starting today, instead of comparing my minor troubles to the horrible things going on in others' lives every day, I choose not to. When I want to whine and elicit sympathy in the form of favorites, likes, or double taps, I'll remember the thousand good things that happen to me every day. I hope you do too.
