It's a beautiful Saturday morning as you sit outside a local coffee shop. You've got your Bible open, an untouched Blueberry muffin, and a cup and saucer filled to the brim with foam from a latte. It's perfect way to spend your morning and like most millennials, you bring out your phone to snap a few pictures. Each time, you try different angles or switching the layout of your pictures. After that comes the editing and adding the desired color filter. With a quickly worded phrase like "Spending my morning with Jesus & coffee," your photo is ready to upload on social media.
As humans, we love to capture every moment in life. From family events and special occasions to just catching up with old friends, we want to document the occasion. Before cameras, people usually sketched or painted instead of using Snapchat and Instagram. Now with a simple click, everyone can see how wonderful our life is - or at least the life that we present to them.
It has been stated before that our generation has a social media obsession. We always want people to know what we are doing, where we are going, and who we are with. From our carefully put together outfits to the perfect sunset, every documented portion of our lives must be perfect. We want people think that we have everything all figured out and put together, but the truth is we don't.
Millennials often lash out at society for the extreme pressures that they put on us, but are they really any different from the ones we place on ourselves? The pressure to be perfect goes beyond our body types and into our lifestyles. We want the perfect life like all those celebrities that we follow religiously on social media. Pretty Little Liars actress,Troian Bellisario, is one of those people for me. Not only is she a talented actress, but her Instagram is filled will all sorts of interesting pictures. However, when speaking about social media, Troian said
My least favorite thing about social media is that I could be having the worst day ever, and I'll post a picture of a pretty sunset and be like, 'So grateful.' But then everybody is like 'Oh my God you have the best life!' I'm like, 'No, I just cried in my car for three hours, and then I took a picture of a sunset.' I'm not going to have a video of me sobbing and be like, 'Life is sometimes awful...'
One of the many things I have learned recently is that it is okay to not have it all figured out. No one in the history of the world has it all figured out. At our age, we expect so much from ourselves due to the things we see others our age do. However, that cycle needs to be broken. Learning to be content and to be patient are two difficult task that our generation needs to learn. Because there will come a point in which the lives we lead or more important than the pictures we take.
