Instagram’s New Feature To Hide ‘Likes’ Might Be The Solution To Insecurity on Social Media
Comparison is truly a thief of joy.
Instagram recently announced that it was testing a new feature- one that hides the number of likes and views a picture or video gets and, honestly, it's about time.
Let's be honest here- social media has torn this generation apart. We're all SO focused on the best things to post, what we shouldn't post, how many followers someone has, how many likes they have, etc. The list is truly never-ending.
At one point or another, we've all been scrolling through social media and saw a post from someone and thought something along the lines of, “Why can't I pull off something like that?" “Why can't I be that tan?" “I wish I was as fit as them." And that, too, is a list that goes on forever (and ever).
What we don't realize is that social media is a highlight of someone's life. What we don't see (which can be called the 'behind the scenes') is someone's worst moments. We don't see when their hair is a mess. We don't see when they have a massive breakout. We don't see when they're bloated and don't feel comfortable in a swimsuit. We see their BEST moments and that is what most people don't realize. We're so used to comparing our behind the scenes to someone else's highlights and we automatically wonder why we can't have highlights like them.
Yeah, that swimsuit model looks great and all, but she also has her bad days. She doesn't always have super tan skin with beautifully curled hair and a perfect contour.
Sure, that male athlete has abs and shows off his super healthy meals, but you don't see what he eats on his cheat day.
You are more than what you see on social media. You are worth more than the number of likes you get. Your worth is NOT low because you have 1 like, just like your worth isn't more just because you have 100 or 1,000 likes.
All of the numbers that you see on social media are exactly that- numbers. Nothing more, nothing less.
This new feature is long overdue. It's time for us to start focusing on the content that people post, rather than if they got 1 like or 1,000 likes.
And remember, a flower doesn't compete to the flower next to it- it just blooms.
I Post For Me, Not For All the Likes I'll Get
"Do you think now is a good time to post? I want to make sure that a lot of people will see it."
On average, I spend about an hour on Instagram daily. Most of the time, I go on it because I'm bored out of my mind and I'm not about to just be productive and do my homework. The other times, I scroll through my feed to look at the many different types of pictures people post. Photography has always been a big part of my life through the influence of my dad who is a photographer. I like to live my life through my pictures. That probably sounds so bad but I don't think of it that way. I'm not the type of person that will pull out my phone when anything happens just to capture the moment. With that being said, I do take a lot of photos. One of my favorite things to do is go back and look through my pictures. I've always been bad at journaling, so taking pictures is my equivalent.
When I post my pictures on Instagram, I mainly share photos of me with my friends. This is one way to utilize the app and it is probably the most popular. For many people that I know, and I have also been guilty of this, they tend to care about how they look and think in terms of how many likes and comments they'll get on their pictures. Sometimes, when I get a new follower, I will stalk myself to see what my new follower will see when they stalk me. I think way too much about what others think of me. The truth is that people really are not thinking about you and judging you as hard as you think they are. After coming to terms with this realization, I have made it one of my many goals in life to not care about what people think of me in hopes of gaining more confidence. One of the ways that I've been trying to accomplish this goal is by posting the pictures I want instead of the ones I think people will want. I've decided to start sharing the photos that I like best, not the ones I think people will like best.
Photography is one of the passions I have that many people don't know about, mainly because I don't really talk about it and I don't carry around an expensive camera with me everywhere I go. But I've decided that my Instagram is where I want to share my favorite photos whether it be a picture of my friends and me or of a pretty latte I drank at a cute coffee shop. I don't want other people's opinions to hold me back. I love photography. Instagram is a place to share photography.