How we live for the social media.
After all these years, when we look at the mirror, when we talk to our inner self, we search effortlessly for the people we are because we spent time chasing trends, changing with it,
letting social media decide for us, people’s opinion conflict with ours, and never took time to think about what we really wanted for ourselves.
If there was anything we wished for, it will be for time to go back to where these all started…
When we were just teens, we had a lot of time by our side, those times were empty, with the burning desire to fill up those empty spaces, and the social media came to our rescue.
With just a click, we could view lives all over the world. The social media gave us the power to decide what we liked or not, asked for our opinion, debated with people who disagreed with our opinions no matter the age, created and joined several communities of like minds. The freedom we could not get as teens was given to us or was it?
The social media platforms wanted our attention so badly that it went through revolution. Various platform rose and fell, with each trying to out-do the other, trying to keep up with the changes. Psychology mashed up with technology kept us there, our notifications colors on red to trigger attention, short videos looped horizontally together to keep us there, sophisticated artificial intelligence to learn what we loved, to give us what we desired.
These made us believe we had every power in our hands and as the social media changed, we? We also changed with it. We all had goals in life to achieve but when the reality of life
played on us, we turned to the social media to feed us with what we could not achieve. The people who had the perfect body, the extravagant spending, the celebrity life styles, the perfect relationship and after scrolling through, we slumped back, questioned ourselves, under-rated our skills, to keep up with those lifestyle we soon became our own demons.
The camera became the most active application in our phones. We lived because of the it, whenever we visited an expensive place, the social media knew. Before we ate, we feed the social media, when we hang out with our friends, the social media knew, any single progress we made, the social media was waiting to binge on it. Made friends based on photogenic looks and how presentable they are, and out of shame, hid those that mattered in our lives. Best moments in our lives became based off on the amount of likes or videos we captured. Humiliated ourselves and others just for five minutes of fame.
Soon enough, trends influenced every area of our lives. We
went on extreme diet to fit in the internet body standard. We dropped our collage degrees because some influencers insulted our professors degree, degrade the certificate education offered, to them life was based on how many followers, we owned.
Our decisions was based on the likes and comments and also with time these built in us the desire to be seen better than others rather than what we wanted for ourselves.
With the body taken away, the social media works its way up to the mind. In next to no time, the algorithm promoted conflict between two genders, trend which turned one race against the other, algorithm that shove depression down our throat and also religion against the other. Dragging each other in the comment section, when things escalated it had its own hashtag.
We were not even a chance to grow at our own pace, teenagers desired the success of 50 year olds. Consistency was preached without being practiced, promoted but despised when seen. We forgot that success was a result of trying and failing multiple times.
Thing got worse, when sexualizing mental illness became a
trend, with content all over the place promoting it, we soon began to pinpoint silly symptoms and consciously develop mental illness. They also made us believe no one cared,
giving normal life examples for us to see reasons with them. What did we do? We ghosted everyone.
Before we could notice, our phones became our lives; the sound of the notification sent everything to halt. We modified our lives to fit into the trends. We lost our inner voice.
Outside we had everything people wanted but deep inside we did not know who we are, where we are heading because we are waiting for the social media to direct for us.
How do we get out of this loop?
Hi, I pour out whatever that is going on in my head here, if you want to be in my head, click the follow button. If you think this deserve a tip, buy me coffee.
I also have a digital guided journal to help you overcome failure, get it here.
