Social Media is Full of Lies

People say I’m brave for starting this blog and sharing my thoughts and feelings with whoever cares to read them. It’s courageous to be honest or whatever.

But I wonder why honesty is the exception and not the norm? I wonder why social media is used to highlight our best moments, while pretending that we never feel anything less than perfect. I wonder why we can’t be open about our thoughts and feelings online without others considering it brave.

We all have shitty moments. We all have shitty days. When we create this fake persona online, I think there’s a large aspect that bleeds into our offline persona. And when our offline persona doesn’t match our reality, we exist in a constant state of cognitive dissonance.

Holding two contrasting ideas at the same time about who we are, presenting one to the world around us, while concurrently surpressing our natural self creates a lot of internal struggle.

When we pretend this internal struggle doesn’t exist for the sake of keeping up appearances, we lose sight of who we are. We replace authenticity with a facade of perfection. We conceal our true selves with a superficial mask.

And when we spend so much time, sometimes hours a day, on our phones, looking at these fake online personas, I wonder how it distorts our view of reality. I wonder how we shape our expectations for what life is “supposed to be” based on what we see on social media. I wonder if we compare our lives to others, constantly worrying that we aren’t doing enough. Worrying that we aren’t enough.

Then when we see people doing cool things on social media, we have this continuous fear of missing out. It doesn’t matter if the photos we see are fake or fabricated because the image of perfection becomes more important than the actual reality.

We know that the images we see in magazines are photoshopped and yet we still compare our bodies to models who look nothing like their photos in person. We know that sometimes we are having a boring time out with friends, but still take a video for our snapchat stories to prove that we are having fun.

This is madness.

I am tired of pretending my life is great when sometimes it’s not. I’m tired of being surrounded by inauthenticity. It’s not possible for life to be amazing all the time, and that’s okay! Once we realize that a lot of what we are surrounded by is merely a facade, we will be able to free ourselves of the ridiculous expectations forced upon us by our digital world.