Social media has been around for as long as we can remember; GEN Z essentially doesn’t know life without it. The first thing most people (myself included) do in the morning is check our phones for any notifications and go on to scroll through Instagram on our way to work or college. While this habit of ours may not seem to impact us in any way, after all it’s just laughing at memes, forwarding reels and seeing what our friends are up to right? How could that affect our self-image or the way we perceive others?
Well it may not directly have an effect on us, but the constant buzz that social media comes with is not healthy for us either. How many times a day do we come across ideal couples, or someone who has achieved it all at 25 and automatically delve into that horrid spiral of overthinking and questioning our life and choices? Social media is a great platform for showing how good life can get, but what it often doesn’t show is the years and years of hard work, the breakdowns and the failures. We as human beings are generally prone to a negative bias, no matter how good something may be our pesky little mind still somehow manages to find faults in it.
Pair this with the unreal world of social media and what we get is a couple of pessimistic youngsters suffering from an array of mental health issues, whose answers again they end up looking for on social media, from the so called ”mental health coaches” and end up self-diagnosing themselves.
This is not to say that we shouldn’t use social media, after all it is the thing that keeps most of us connected at the end of the day, but practice being mindful of the type of content we consume and the type of people we follow and interact with, we may follow a beloved celebrity couple and dote over them but when they separate even after having a fairy tale romance, it certainly does affect our idea of love whether we like it or not. Not only should the viewer exercise caution and mindfulness while engaging on social media, the same should be practiced by our influencers. Most of them like to post the good that goes on in their lives but like Yin and Yang, life comes with its series of good and bad moments which are equally important to be shown, so that we all know it’s okay to fail, to be confused, to be heartbroken and most of all okay to be a mess.