Social Media as Real Life’s Mary Kay
An attempt to assess how social media is flooded with beautiful stories that are majorly cosmetic realities.
Our society today is breeding a whole new generation of hey-everything-is-perfect-in-my-life people, who have only being able to amplify these impressions through the use of social media. But in truth, bulk of these posts are nothing but cosmetic realities. According to Oxford Pocket Dictionary of Current English, cosmetic simply means :
affecting only the appearance of something rather than its substance.
Each time you refresh your Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or Snapchat feeds, everyone is happy and celebrating one thing or the other. A thirteen year old Cognitive Developer just got hired by Google, Davido just announced he has 30 billion dollars in his account, a bread seller just became the owner of a house in Lekki, a 21 year old beautiful actress just announced she’s still a virgin, a beautiful curvy daughter of a rich man just graduated with a First Class, 14 people got married on your timeline, ati be be lo… Meanwhile, you’re in your rented one room self contain trying to figure out if to include Career Objectives on your C.V or not. And when you see these things, your mind shatters, and you can’t help it from wallowing in the thoughts of “do these folks have two heads???”.
Now here’s the problem:
The media only showcases the extremes. Why? Because it is the extremes that get the attention of the majority (which you have trapped yourself to be among), and it is this utter interest that brings the dollars. In other words, it is the attention of the majority that can be easily monetized. Instagram pays it’s intern an average of $7,000 per month, where do you think Mark will get such money from if you visit Instagram and all you see are photos of heartbreaks, job losses, accidents e.t.c
In my Digital Marketing class at Wild Fusion, we were taught that we have 3 kinds of media, the paid, the owned and the earned. In layman’s terms:
Paid media is the one you pay for, e.g paying Facebook or Instagram so they can boost your post to increase reach and/or frequency.
Owned media is the one you own and don’t need to pay for e.g your personal status updates on Facebook, Instagram e.t.c I do not have to pay for you to see this article, I own the Medium account.
Earned media is the one you earn as a result of other people thinking your owned media is cool e.g retweets on twitter, reposts on Instagram, e.t.c If you share this article, your share becomes an earned media for me.
Why do I have to explain all of these?
Because all media are paid media.
The major difference is that instead of actively paying cash for retweets and reposts, you pay with efforts in building your followership, you pay in time taken for coming up with such an awesome post to start with, you pay for your data e.t.c
In the end, owned and earned media are just invested media.
Everybody Cannot Be Good At Everything
Whenever you feel down on anything in your life, there is a chance someone is getting it perfectly right on social media. And if you have 10 things going wrong in your life, you will be bombarded with over 200 images or videos of people younger than you figuring it out perfectly on social media. The issue with the guilt we feel whenever we see these is this:
Each of these 200 people have only decided to post one thing that is working for them online, they also have other things that are not working for them but choose to focus on the only one thing they want to publicize. And now we get to the interesting part: each of these persons will also see the other 199 people as having shits figured out that they likely are still having issues with. And from this simple experiment, we can conclude that not everybody has it figured out.
It becomes even more interesting when you dig deeper and discover that majority of these posts are mere cosmetic appearances of actual realities. I mean more than 50% of people that take pictures smiling in the driver’s seat, have no cars. These statistics could vary according to your networks, but the stark reality that real life can actually be faked is enough reason not to stress or worry yourself over cosmetic realities on social media.
Have you seen the countless images of shocking Before and After Make-Up transformations on ladies that trend on social media
This is actually how far some people could go to create an impression of appearance beauty while the real substance still remains in a mess. The comparism in this scenario becomes immediately apparent because we can revert to the real face on the left from the “marykayed” impression on the right. How do we revert to the real situations of things from the smiles all over social media when we do not have access to the Before images?
I would acknowledge at this stage that some stories are real, a lot of people are getting shit right, some are not cosmetic, but they are only a fraction and it is called a fraction because of the reasons I will explain below.
Statistics Cannot Favour Everyone
No matter the drive and seriousness all fresh students come into the university with, only about 5% will make a distinction. No matter how beautiful, careful or prayerful you are, majority of relationships will not lead to marriage. No matter how smart the security operatives of any vicinity are, they won’t be able to curb all crimes.
So the point is this: statistics cannot favour everyone. And each time my mum panics whenever I tell her I’m traveling by air, she is indirectly hoping that statistics should be in my favour. But the reason why statistics exist in the first place is because everybody cannot fit in, so the acknowledgement of that divide is imperative.
Conclusion
The benefits of social media are innumerable, but these advantages do not come without it’s own costs. The more we become aware of these principles of cosmetics and statistics, the more we are able to do more and worry less.
There needs to be some acknowledgement that life comes with shit, and people painting their lives as shitless are either using Mary-Kay or are just part of the lucky <0.05% that are getting theirs perfect at that moment, and whatever the case, your mantra should be to move on regardless.
