I am one of many, I mean many millennials who are mindlessly tapping into their social media apps on their iPhones between classes every day. I've noticed that this has become an integral part of my everyday life, without me really being conscious of how it affects my lifestyle. Like myself, many people's daily lives consist of scrolling through Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook and Twitter, and these social media apps really do affect us and our lives. In my opinion, we are addicted. And it is not healthy.

Why do we care? Why are we so glued to our social media? Because it has shaped our minds to work that way; we care about what's going on in other people's lives, what's trending, and to have the constant need to portray your own life as attractive, because that's what builds a lot of people's self-esteem these days. I have noticed that many people, including myself, have the constant desire to do something eventful just for the sake of posting about it on social media. That tendency has grown exponentially in our generation. Remember the phrase "Do it for the Vine"?That became "do it for the gram" now and it literally translates to "do it so that I can post about it."

It's okay if it's for your own pleasure of photography or for other self-satisfactory reasons. But it becomes harmful when people start to question how "interesting" their lives are, or start comparing their lives to someone else's life. Or, I should say, someone else's life on Instagram. A lot of the times, what someone's life seems like on social media isn't exactly their entire life. Mostly it's only the good and fun parts of their lives that they want people to know about. I mean, who wants to post about how you tried on a million outfits for one post, or how you stressed over a caption of a photo you wanted to post for a whole day? Not many people do.

The point of all this is to make it seem good or to make your life seem fun because our generation is all about the image, the social status, and the reputation. Whatever you want to call it, we have become a generation that is obsessed with the number of likes and followers, the candid photos, and the superficial images without even being conscious of it. Something happened? We want to post about it, gossip about it, and not really live about it. We do things for social media. Really, social media is controlling what we do. We don't really pay attention to our surroundings anymore because we're so glued to our phones: our constant source of information, mostly about other people's lives.

So we really need to learn to stop this. Let's put down our phones, even just for an hour or two a day to start with. Let's have a conversation with friends without bringing up what you saw on your other friend's social media. Let's not spend an hour taking photos in different angles for your Instagram. Remember, your social media does not define you or your life. Don't let that stop you from living your life how you want to, because really, as corny as it may sound, you won't get to truly live in your moment if you're constantly caring about how other people perceive you or your life.