All Dressed Up and Nowhere To Take a Selfie (Part 2)

If you’re not careful, this life will destroy you.

Hell, even if you are careful, it will still destroy you. It will destroy your self-esteem, your sense of self-worth, your self-image, and everything else that has the word “self” in it. It may even destroy everything you use to define yourself, effectively reducing you a broken, dribbling mess, a mindless shell of the person you should have been (a depressing start I know, but bear with me and it will get better. Maybe).

I know this isn't an original point, and that there are countless other, and probably better written, blog posts out there with truly inspiring messages about how you shouldn't always focus on the negatives, how you shouldn't let other’s opinions influence you, how you shouldn't compare yourself to others, etc. And that’s true. However, much like this exact post, those posts/messages/quotes don’t actually stop people from doing those things. And nowhere is this more obvious than in the deep, dark, wretched abyss that is social media.

When our lives basically consist out of content marketing campaigns for social media, it becomes impossible to live free. Our news feeds get flooded with posts of people who seem to ‘like’ (yet never actually love) their lives. We get lost in photos of people’s parties, holidays, adventures, and status updates about lost love, but new-found wisdom, and we wish that our lives could be as cool as those of our friends on Facebook.

Our lives become restricted by the frame of an Instagram photo, and by the 140 character limit of a Tweet, and we start to feel inferior and unimportant if we don’t have countless photos of our own lives and achievements plastered all over the Internet. We start to feel like we’ll never be as cool as everyone with 600+ photos in the “2015 – The Good Times” (or “lul GuD TymEZ”) albums, as pretty as the people who always have really beautiful selfies, as popular as the people with over 800 “friends”, or even just as generally happy as everyone else seems to be (although some comment boards may leave you feeling slightly more intelligent, but also fearing for the future of humanity. So pros and cons).

It consumes our lives, and leaves us thinking that “if it isn't online, it never actually happened”. We’re even conditioned to believe that our lives are terrible and worthless because we aren't tagged in a fresh batch of photos every Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday morning, documenting the previous evening’s shenanigans while you sit alone in your room, all dressed up and nowhere to take a selfie. Even if it’s not a conscious occurrence, it’s still a belief that I know sweeps through your mind as surely as it does mine.

We start comparing our lives to the false realities of what we see on the Internet, not only those of our friends, but also those of the pages we follow. We also start comparing ourselves to the posed, heavily Photoshopped photos we’re bombarded with on a daily basis, and we start thinking, and eventually believing, that we’ll never be able to accomplish anything close to what the people online have done. We believe that we’ll never be able to make anything of ourselves, and we genuinely believe that we may as well stop trying, because everything we attempt will fail.

However, the lives of all those bright, shiny people might not be living as easy as they appear to be, because the people with 1 056 friends and 5 674 tagged photos are filled with just as much self-doubt and loneliness as those with 384 friends. Maybe even more. It truly is a vicious cycle we subject ourselves to. This makes me (and probably only me) wonder: are we not more than this? Has human nature sunk so low that we value our lives based on what others will see on our Timelines? Are we really allowing ourselves to be destroyed by a society where cats get more appreciation than those who are actively trying to make a difference in the world? Is 1984 becoming a documentary instead of a warning? Can an octopus see colour? Does a hedgehog know how adorable it is? Was Gravity really that good? But I digress. (This is almost finished, I promise)

We have become filled with the crippling self-doubt that humanity seems to impose on its populace nowadays. When taking all of the above into consideration, it becomes significantly less surprising that levels of anxiety and depression are on the rise. And I know this post isn't going to change anything. I just wrote it that it may raise this single thought in your mind: Are you going to let the social media life destroy you, or are you going to rise above the squalor and live a life free of social pressure?

I really hope so. But probably not. But one can always dream. And on that note, I release you. Be free. And if you've actually made it this far, well done. You must have been really, really bored to read that dribble.

Now I'm off to have a drink and take a selfie in a club bathroom.