“Social media is not real,” says 18-year old Instagram star Essena O’Neill. Essena is a social media celebrity from the Sunshine Coast of Australia.
Essena has “everything.” She had money, fame, the “perfect” body, and too many people’s standards, the “perfect” life.
On Tuesday November 3, 2015 Essena made a YouTube video announcing that she is quitting social media for good. She went on to explain her reasoning behind this decision. The video has since gone viral.
This decision was not an easy one, for Essena’s entire career is based off of social media. She gets paid to model for certain companies and she had over 500,000 Instagram followers by the time she decided to quit social media.
“I’m doing this for my 12-year old self,” states Essena at one point in her video. She goes on to explain that when she was 12, she looked up to all of these teenage girls who were “insta-famous” or “youtube-famous” and made it her goal to be just like them. In her 12-year-old eyes, they had it all. They were living the dream. Essena says that she began to define herself by numbers and her life became toxic. She became obsessed with how many likes her pictures got and how many followers and subscribers she had on Instagram and YouTube. O’Neill says that her life was no longer about herself, it was about her followers. She was doing everything to beat her previous goals. She says that she was never satisfied with how many likes she got or how many followers she had on social media, she always wanted more.
“I told myself that when I had heaps of views, people would view me. I would feel valued. I would feel happiness,” says O’Neill.
Before deleting her Instagram for good, Essena deleted some photos and left a few up. She edited the captions of the ones that she left up to reveal the truth of what was going on in each photo.
“I don’t even know what’s real anymore….I’ve been living my life through a screen.”
At the end of her video, Essena challenges each one of the viewers to turn off their cell phones for a week and talk to the people around them.
Over the past week or so since O’Neill released this video, there has been much discussion over whether or not social media is real. I happen to completely agree with everything that O’Neill is saying in her video. It’s so easy to get caught up in how you portray yourself on social media. Social media is who you are. It is your brand. When employers are looking for new people to hire, one of the first things that they do is go to your social media accounts and see how you portray yourself online.
Social media runs our society. We have the ability to share our lives with other people which is equally amazing and awful at the same time. We can connect with someone who lives on the other side of the world with a simple click which is absolutely incredible. We can make connections with other people, build an image for ourselves and get job offers or other opportunities through the power of social media.
Social media started out as a resource for people to use to connect with others. Now it is about numbers. How many likes did my Instagram picture get? How many followers do I have? Is my follower/following ratio equal or do I need to unfollow more people to make myself seem cooler? Nothing matters anymore besides the numbers and it’s sad how caught up in it everyone gets without even realizing it.
Nothing is private anymore. Everything is instant. Snapchat is literally used to let people know what we are doing at every waking moment of the day. When we look at someone’s Snapchat story for the day we know exactly what they did from the moment they woke up until the moment they went to sleep. We’re all guilty of documenting our days and that’s fine, it’s just not natural.
It’s important to realize how much your online image impacts your “real life” image. That’s why it’s so easy to get caught up in the fantasy of who you are online. I am a victim of getting caught up in social media. Sometimes I find myself caring way too much about how many likes I get on my Instagram photos, how many followers I have and how many retweets my last tweet got. If it’s not enough, I will delete the picture or tweet and move on with my day. It’s so easy to let those numbers define your value as a human being and it’s ridiculous that as a society, we let those numbers define us.
As a society I think we need to relearn basic social skills. Even the smallest things like making eye contact and smiling at someone as you get in an elevator can go a long way. Small talk isn’t even a thing anymore. It used to be considered normal to sit down next to someone at the train station and strike a conversation, even if it’s just about the weather. Now that would be considered totally weird and awkward. It’s ironic how “social” media has almost completely butchered people’s social skills.
Put your phone down for five minutes when you are in a public place and look around. I guarantee you that almost every single person will be preoccupied by some form of technology. People will be texting or calling someone, listening to music, or checking their emails. It is a rare thing to see someone walking without a phone in their hand and making conversation with the people around them.
Essena O’Neill is courageous for speaking up about the “fakeness” of social media in general. She is the voice that the younger generations will listen to. She is the voice that the younger generations need to hear. Social media can be a good thing, but too much of it can be damaging.
Put your phones down and take in the world around you. Do something you love without letting every single one of your followers know what you are doing at that exact moment. There is something exciting and almost peaceful about knowing that nobody is aware of what you are doing.
Stop living through a screen and be present. Life is more enjoyable that way.
