This all started a couple weeks ago on a Sunday evening when my roommate and I sat in our dorm in silence. We both were just staring at our phones, checking all our social media apps, only to check them again less than five minutes later. We both came to the conclusion that social media was not only distracting and a waste of time, but also realized that it was not giving us any fulfillment. This led us to make the decision to go off of social media for at least a week, in attempts to see how our lives would be without it.
Social media is a big part of teenage lives. While it is a big way to stay in touch with our friends near and far, it is also very harmful. It seems as if we put so much effort into the way we want ourselves to be portrayed online. One of the reasons I decided to give up social media for a while was because I got too invested in what others thought out me. I became too worried about how others were going to view me if I posted a certain picture on social media. I was too obsessed with how many likes my Instagram picture was going to get, how many comments my Facebook post was going to get, how many retweets my post on Twitter was going to get, and how long I could keep my Snapchat streak going with my friends.
Social media went from something that was supposed to be fun, to something that was actually harming me. I realized that notifications letting me know that someone had “liked” or “commented” or “retweeted” my post are not self-esteem boosters; they may be for some people, but certainly not for me. A notification may seem like you are becoming more included in the world, when in reality you are becoming more detached.
The big problem with social media is the accuracy in which we choose to publish ourselves. Instagram feeds are in actuality, the highlights of someone’s life edited and filtered to make it seem like their lives are that much better than everyone else’s. The ultimate truth is that we post what we want others to think of us; what we want them to see so they hold a certain high opinion of us. We will spend half an hour trying to think of the best Instagram caption or the perfect tweet. We will quickly take a picture for our Snapchat story and post 30 pictures of a hike we took with our best friends on Facebook.
Yet, who are we really posting for? Ourselves? If we were posting for ourselves, our various social media feeds would look a whole lot different than they do now. We post for other people. The scary thing about social media is that everything that is posted is simply just not that person. We are posting because we want others to know that we are having a great time. We want others to know that we went to this great party. We want others to know that we are having a blast each and every day.
Nothing gets posted on social media regarding the bad days we had, it is (usually) always positive, never negative. Here is the thing, not everyone’s life is all the time 100-percent great. Mine isn't, yours isn’t, nobody’s is. Yet we still get jealous when we scroll endlessly through the feeds of our 600 “friends” on social media.
When I returned to social media a week later, I found that I had missed out on nothing. I checked up on Instagram only to see that everything had remained the same. I found that by not being on social media, I was able to have my own fulfillment, without having to compare my life to everyone else’s.
