No more parties, no more studying and nothing to do with our long summer days. Too many days are spent scrolling through Instagram and watching Netflix. Judging by your feed, everyone else is on an amazing outdoor adventure while you sit and mindlessly consume media. Your life is looking dull in comparison. You’re starting to worry about your followers abandoning you in your time of idleness.
We all worry about the upkeep of our precious social media identities, but we rarely take the time to consider the reason we worry. It seems so important to announce that evening hike. The hike that included a lot of complaining and water breaks, though your caption suggests otherwise.
It’s almost as if the only reason a person leaves their house nowadays is to take photos. Besides, if you didn’t put it on the Internet, did it really happen?
It is easy to get so wrapped up in our social media that it becomes the source of our fulfillment. The amount of “likes” you got on the photo of your morning cup of coffee seems to matter more than it should. Standing on top of a mountain isn’t as satisfying as one hundred “likes” on a photo of you standing on top of that mountain.
Your Instagram portrays your life the way you want others to see it. You create an identity for yourself with your social media and often you have a lot of pride in it. If others don’t validate the self-image that you created by ‘liking’ your photos, it’s a disappointment.
Selfies are extra dangerous. They have problematic potential because they can bring your attention away from how stunningly good looking you are. The public nature of selfies puts a focus on what others deem attractive. Selfies lead to seeking validation of your appearance when it should be about sharing a smile and a thought.
Most of us know what it’s like to be disappointed by a lack of social media attention. I, too, have posted photos that were shamelessly deleted after five minutes due to a low number of “likes”. I have created an online self-image like anyone else. To some extent, we are all guilty of advertising certain personas online.
Becoming too entrenched in your social media can be hard to avoid in a world that depends so heavily on technology. Your real life isn’t satisfying, so you create an image of yourself that does satisfy you. You wish you traveled all the time, so you continuously post photos of the trip you took six months ago to make it look like your life is exciting.
But if you are depending entirely on your Instagram to seem like a unique individual, people will probably think you’re boring in person. Flaunt who you are online instead of who you wish you were and don’t worry about how many people “like” it. Your self-image on Instagram does not equate to the real you. Find fulfillment in other ways.
Put away your camera from time to time and don’t worry about broadcasting every exciting thing you do. It is important to be in the moment. There is something divine about those experiences that cannot be captured in a picture. Derive your satisfaction from those moments, not from the “likes” you get afterward. Next time you are standing on top of a mountain, take it in and do it for you. Life isn’t about the followers.