Being a young person on social media today means…

Being immersed in a realm of hyper-labelling the tiniest aspects of everyday life. We’re exposed to copious amounts of variously named diets, types of aesthetics, personality traits and lifestyles.

We are lectured and instructed on so many things by strangers who sound so convincing and so knowing – it makes us want to believe and trust what they say when they tell us:

→ The ways we should and shouldn’t be acting
→ What lunch we should eat – and how we should cook it!
→ What products we NEED to buy and from which shops to buy them
→ Even how we should choose our friends and romantic partners!

All this hyper analytical content that adds up over our recommended feed can instil a habit to overthink. It encourages us to live lives of comparison – lives of questioning – are we following all the rights steps? Are we doing ‘it’ right?

I can see this sets unnatural expectations and creates impossible standards to live up to – not only for ourselves but also the standards we hold for those around us.

Influencers can take normal and human behaviours and alter our perspectives of them by framing them to be ‘good’ or ‘bad’. For example, if we consider big displays of efforts that we see a partner do for their significant other online and all of a sudden this is taken to be a given and that we must look for this in our own relationships as this is the ‘bare minimum’.

We are told to have checklists of perfect qualities that we should expect others to have but this is no way natural things to expect people to be all at once.

Importantly, and unfortunately, we get the impression that if our reality doesn’t match what we’ve been seeing online, something in our life is flawed.

This thinking pattern makes us scrutinise not only ourselves but those around us.

I believe consuming a constant stream of influencer content takes away our judgement and ability to form our own impression which is a scary thing to notice in yourself.

To realise that by scrolling online, I gradually erase my individuality as I start attempting to fit in with the ‘norm’ or with what’s cool’ was shocking – especially when I consider how incidentally and gradually this happened.

To end, I want to talk about how the sad thing about social media nowadays is the lack of genuine content as most of what we see isn’t helpful, isn’t necessary, may be fake all together because influencers tend to post what will get the most attention and interaction without any regard for the real effect the have on their viewers… apart from the rare few of course.

- By a young person on social media today