One of life’s biggest distractions today is more of a threat to our fun and happiness than we may even realize. It comes in many forms, it is designed to be as aesthetically pleasing as possible and it is not tangible.
Social media can be more detrimental to living in the moment and experiencing the events that matter when the focus is on attention for oneself, instead of just leisure consumption.
Our social media pages revolve around perfecting our images and finely tuning everything from captions to the other people or pages we tag in our posts.
Gaining the most followers and traction on any given medium such as Instagram, Snapchat or Twitter is almost a full-blown competition if you take a step back and really examine it.
Likes, favorites, retweets, reblogs and so on are nice and all, but the unwavering search for as many as possible is not even worth the time.
Living in the present is something taken for granted nowadays and thanks to social media, it is even harder to do now for some people.
The one thing MySpace got right, out of the many things we would now consider wrong (such as the black and white photos with only one bright color highlighted), was at least it was a place to express oneself instead of conforming to what the “trendy” people are doing.
Sharing music, perfecting your “Top 8” friends and customizing your page after combing through hundreds of colors and themes was fun. It was a place we could all go on online to hang out with our friends without constant adult supervision and do our own thing.
Nowadays, some of us want to look like the perfect adult and in reality, that is just not the case when compared to how our lifestyle actually looks.
Even on applications such as Snapchat, which places emphasis on sharing stories as a way of broadcasting to your friends en masse, seems to be more similar to an orchestral performance than a livestream.
Above it all, though, is the self-marketing on Instagram. Unless you are paid a ridiculous amount of money by an advertiser to communicate with your ridiculous number of followers, then there is no need to be dissatisfied with what you choose to share.
Fifty likes are not enough, 100 likes are decent and 200 likes could be considered satisfactory by today’s social media standards. This all should not matter as much as it does.
Sharing your life on social media is only as stressful as you make it on yourself, so there really is not much of a point in trying to satisfy your need for attention with likes.
A cool photograph at a concert has to go through three different editing applications and be approved by a board of directors via group message before it reaches Instagram at the optimal posting time of 7:02 p.m.
It should not be that hard to just share life as it is. Less is more whether you realize it or not, so have fun going on adventures and enjoying young adulthood instead of obsessing over the distracting aspects of social media.
