In today's world, social media is the most important thing. I mean what's the use of meeting my friends if I can't post it on my story? Or what's the use of visiting a scenic place if I can't take pictures to post? What is the point of dressing up if I don't get at least 100 likes? This has sadly become the reality of many people across the world. The one and only thing that matters is social media.
Most people are so obsessed with getting likes and followers that their only interaction with people is to talk about social media and take pictures. People seem to have forgotten the importance and necessity of physical interactions. We all must have noticed that often when we meet our friends or relatives we tend to spend more time taking selfies than actually talking. Or we spend more time finding the perfect caption for our friend’s birthday picture than actually spending time with them. While there is nothing wrong with doing these, we should not neglect the actual people in our life.
We should not become so obsessed with creating the perfect fake life that we don't have an actual life aside from social media. Various studies have shown that social media fuels feelings of loneliness, depression and FOMO (fear of missing out). By looking at other people’s lives, we end up concluding that everyone’s life is cooler than ours. We compare our lives with others and try to make ours more interesting.
“We want the world to see that we are happy, always doing adventurous, fulfilling activities and that we're on top of the world. We edit our lives and cut out the real parts, only focusing on the ideal parts of who and what we wish we could be.”
In this process, we often tend to prioritize our social media life so much that when we find ourselves in the midst of a problem or during a hard phase, we don't have anyone to talk to. We don't have anyone to share our problems with and open up to and we don't feel comfortable talking to anyone because we never spent time on building those relationships.
Social media commonly creates a false perception of who people are and what their lives are actually like. This causes people to have low self-esteem or that they are not investing enough in themselves, and can even lead to extremes such as cyber-bullying. Many people often develop the need to look and be perfect. This itself can lead to people feeling inadequate and anxious and social media addiction. Social media addiction is a condition in which a person is overly concerned about social media and has an uncontrollable urge to log on to or use social media, and devoting so much time and effort to social media that it impairs other important life areas. We may often deny being addicted to social media but often the truth is that we do check out phones in 5 minutes to see how many people liked our latest picture. However, the question is why are we posting about all of these things for everyone else to see, instead of simply enjoying the moment of what we're doing. Is it a true depiction of who we are?
Although social media helps us stay connected with people, it creates unrealistic life expectations. It seems like nowadays people rely on social media to feel validated about their lives. Of course, no one is happy all the time and no one is perfect. We should learn to live in the present and have actual interactions with people. When we are not busy on social media we actually spend more time on things that are more likely to make us feel better about life. So, for a start, we should all try to restrict our social media time for our well being.
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