Millenial Lives, Millenial Times: Anti- Social Media
As millenials, we are excellent ‘ brand managers’. We painstakingly craft an online presence that conveys a unique version of ourselves to our friend groups. I’m fairly confident that you have one of the below in your online friend group:
- the bohemian, whose captions you rarely understand, but like anyway so as to not appear shallow. the captions are also typically all lower-case.
- the world traveler, who seems to have an endless supply of time & money to perpetually travel the globe, while gleefully sipping mojitos on a beach
- the art/food/clothing connoisseur whose every story update is a pic/video of one of the above three
- Mr./Ms. Popular whose every story update is at a party, or with a member of the opposite gender, and rarely if ever uploads a photo of himself/herself alone.
However, in this circus of personalities, there is one factor that weaves throughout: depression, loneliness and false appearances. An ever-increasing proportion of millenials (22%) reported “having no friends at all”, a phenomenon former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy labelled a loneliness epidemic. Our anti-social media accounts make it easy to ‘connect’ with our pixelated peers thousands of miles away, yet make it especially easy to ‘block out’ the human sitting 2 feet away from us in flesh and blood. I’m sure you have a friend with whom conversations are always on edge, as you’re never sure when you’ll be outsmarted by the ‘smart phone’.
In a time of ‘stories’ and ‘streaks’, we seem to have gotten out of touch with creating the story that matters the most: our own. And the streak that matters the most: our streak of meaningful contributions to the world. We’re too focused gathering micro-details about others lives, in the name of staying in touch — at the cost of losing touch with ourselves. Perhaps, ‘anti-social media’ is a more apt name?
That said, here are my ‘anti-social media’ accounts:
The ‘gram: adi.tyagi1
The ‘Tube: youtube.com/Adityatyagi97
The book of faces: facebook.com/aditya.tyagi.7906
Sadly, I live in a cave and do not have a snapchat.
