Social Media and Identity
When you have the weight of the world upon your shoulders; where do you turn? I believe we all have something we do turn too, regardless if it’s healthy for us or not. The art of understanding self awareness and self sabotage can bring us a long way on the path of self righteousness.
I lived a long life of questioning who I am, what I wanted, and where I was going. But I never stopped to question who I wanted to be, what I wanted to change and teach, and where I wanted to land. I don’t believe most of us actually take a dive into our sense of self. I mean, why would we? We rely on instant gratification, the acceptance and reassurance of a comment or a like. So, I’ll ask you this. How comfortable are you with validating yourself? I think it’s common for us to seek outside source of security.
Social media is something every teenager was built with — it’s even more dangerous for those born in the 90’s. With the rise of media sources like Myspace or Facebook, we had something incredible to learn about and utilize. Whether or not we used it for socialization and creating new friendships across state lines, or to feed some sort of lost desire we have.
I believe we got caught up, in this almost fantasy world of instant security, and the longing of unrealistic life expectations. So, we often drown ourselves with unhealthy coping skills to fill in that empty space in our rooms. I think we turn to social media way too often. We lost our way of creating more personable relationships, we found ourselves experiencing social angst or feelings of being ostracized.
We have unrealistic and toxic viewpoints of relationships, love, and correlations to drugs. So, how do we help ourselves and our friends? I mean, not every 90’s born individual now has a social media addiction — but I can assure most do. How could we not? Our conditioning to having instant gratification from comments of support or likes on our new hairstyle gives us exactly that.
With the cons of this, there are also pros. But where are we on the agreement that maybe the con’s just outweigh the pros at this point in our life? Where mass information is being spread like light speed and we don’t actually know who we are as individuals with the influencers we have now? We all want what is unrealistic for us — that view out of our bedroom, or the amount of fame that the next person holds.
It’s important to realize that individuality is the one thing that will have absolute certainty of saving face. Individuality and being able to form your own opinions without the influence of media constantly. Stronger bonds in the real world of relationships. Don’t get me wrong — I love a good pen pal. But when will we wake up to the ways media is slowly destroying us? When will we respect and practice moderation in a world of vast consumerism? When will we practice self-love and true acceptance? Turn off the notifications and learn to value and validate yourself. Shut off the Facebook messenger and the Instagram selfies. Tune into reality.
