Social Media changed the world forever and its not for the better. There are millions perhaps billions of posts and articles out there that tell you to enjoy the little things and there’s some more of them telling you to pursue something you love so that every day will be like a vacation. Currently, there’s a trend of “normalising” and “IDK who need to hear this”, as relatable as these posts are, they’re also vague in their nature. You’re bound to catch a few fish if your net is large enough.
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We forget that the reason so many of us have such horrible relationships and mental health is ourselves. When we were kids if someone treated us like a jerk, we cut them off, we didn’t meet them outside of school, we didn’t talk to them in school, that was the last interaction we had with them. If we had a serious friend who we fought with, we waited till the next morning when we were face to face with them to sort it out, we mostly had the same circles to actually avoid them. Today, however, one wrong text and its goodbye forever, blocked on all platforms, no way you’ll run into each other because social media made sure you could stay “friends” with someone with a whole ocean between you.
The Internet was an amazing innovation, it connected people and businesses all over the world, social media was similar until it grew. Social media let you make a profile and created a whole world, it has given people a second life, an anonymous personality that doesn’t have to pay for anything, an existence of guilt-free gung ho attitude towards everything. While everyone posts the same shit not a single person believes in it. It has more to do with how others see what you think or agree with. If you’ve ever played a role-playing game, give it a thought. In its essence, how are the games and social media any different from each other? In both of them, you have a life which no matter how much you upload the person on the other end looking at you will never have a true understanding of who you are, they see only those few aspects they like and move on to find the next similar profile.
Social media was created as a way to let you keep in touch with others and be a part of their life but somewhere along the way with constant “innovation” it has turned into something that has made people run, faster than they can, faster than they have to. Rather than letting social media keep up with their lives, people are now keeping up with social media. This is why posts that talk about normalisation and “IDK who needs to hear this” do so little to help anyone.
Advertising through almost every form of content on the internet has yielded results bigger than most people could’ve imagined, it has also had a far bigger negative impact on the well being of people. Everybody sees how big the real-world impacts are of advertising through the virtual world, what almost everyone misses is that all of these advertisements are tailored for your alter egos living on the internet. It’s safe to say that a sizeable portion of progress the world has seen in the past decade is based on the ideas of people and not actual people. The freedom on these platforms has given birth to personas of desire, people project their out of reach desires and insecurities on to their internet personalities and advertising to these “people” has amplified these feelings of insecurities and insufficiencies. Unlike in the real world, virtual identities can have lives better than reality since it costs almost nothing.
People have lost touch with themselves, losing themselves in a virtual world because, in a world where nothing is real, your own fears, insecurities and unhappiness is also not real. It’s difficult to bring into the real-world and practice the advice or guidance on social media because it comes from a place where everything is generalised and out of context.
There’s no way to change the past, there’s no way to get billions of people to change their ways, the only way I see out of this is to stop living our lives for social media. I wonder if the world will ever reach an age where tools of mass media and communication are not used to push agendas. I wonder if technology will ever reach a stage where virtual communication has a human touch to it. While the world has marched ahead in terms of economic and technological prosperity, I wonder when, if at all the world will progress so as to make sure people are happy rather than rich.
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