The Dark Side of Social Media
After every single Instagram scrolling session you don't feel good? Its because you’ve spent time looking at how good other people are, how good people look, how good their holidays are how good their singing voices are.
No one wants to share the things that they're embarrassed about, humans are actually wired to seek social validation and status and so 99% of what you see on social media is just a highlight reel.
You want to use social media because it gives you a very short-term high from being able to vicariously experience the best parts of other people's lives but the consequence of doing so is that when you return to your own life you're going to feel like something's missing.
People effectively rewrite their lives on social media e.g.
People only post about job promotion; they act as avid traveller by posting photos of them lounging on a beach under the guise and to show how adventurous they are they will post that crazy beautiful sunset that they saw by hiking to the top of a mountain by editing it to make it seem more vibrant than it was.
Tiktok is so successful because it gives users a limitless toolkit to make them the funniest and hottest versions of themselves for everyone else to see and it makes us so unbelievably insecure about our real lives. It creates jealousy and just not as happy as we could be.
We've gone from comparing our imperfect lives to the imperfect lives of the five six neighbours around us to now comparing our imperfect lives to a curated compilation of the most perfect moments from a much wider pool of people and that's a battle you can never win.
But where this starts to get much more alarming is through a phenomenon called ‘Echo Chambers. Put simply, it's not just the other users on social media that you have to worry about. The entire objective of the apps is to keep you on it for as long as possible because that's how they extract the most value from you. Whether that's amazon wanting you to buy more things or facebook wanting you to scroll as many ads as possible