Growing up in the world of Social Media, I have encountered many selfies. Ones with the duck face, ones with #nofilter and ones with far too much filter. After the many years of visual harassment, I can honestly say that selfies are something that causes me to judge and become annoyed with a person. Not only because I honestly don’t care about what a person’s face looks like that day but because there is such a sense of vanity behind something like a selfie. If someone is looking for a sure fire way to seem vain and empty, posting selfies is it. A selfie every once in a while is perfectly fine because, as humans, we can’t resist the urge to post something that means absolutely nothing besides bragging about how we look. However, if someone is the type of person to post multiple selfies a week or even a month, that person is automatically recorded in my book as an airhead. Maybe it is wrong of me to judge people this way, I don’t really care. Social media is built literally as a place for people to judge others. If you don’t want to be judged, don’t post anything.
Yes, I’m aware that this is an exposure of some central flaws in our societal thinking. However, that is just the way things are. Growing up, people always tell you not to care what other people think. While this is a nice concept and wonderful when practiced in moderation, the truth is that it’s human nature to care about what others think. How else do we make friends or snag a job? We have to care on some level what other people think about us. Otherwise, we would simply be an outcast from society. Which, on the surface seems cool and artsy but in all honesty, ends up being quite lonely.
I have a very good friend of mine who drives me to the end of my rope with social media. She is someone I love dearly in person but on the internet, I find myself angry twitching every time she posts a selfie. This isn’t because she’s an annoying person or a complete ditz, it is because the more selfies are posted, the more it makes her seem that way. It drives me nuts because, since I know her well, I know that she isn’t like that. But others who may not know her so intimately immediately judge her and label her as being a “basic white girl.” Which, there’s absolutely no problem with being yourself and being proud of how you look. But, when looking at the bare truth of human interaction, other people don’t actually care about your self-image and will judge you based on your social media posts. It is great to see my friend learning to love how she looks but seeing a selfie multiple times a week makes me want to tear my hair out and that makes me feel like such a terrible person because she is one of my best friends.
Honestly, though, I think selfies might be a level of Hell. Almost as if when you get to Hell and one of the first levels is being forced to look at selfies for fifty years or something. That’s how much I hate them. Because, as I have said multiple times, no one really cares. People will comment saying that a person looks hot or pretty but usually those are fairly empty compliments. Maybe I’m being harsh but whatever, it’s how I feel.
Another thing that really pisses me off about selfies is their empty sense of confidence that they give people. My friend will tell me that she doesn’t care about the amount of likes she gets on a selfie but that fact is whether she realizes or not, subconsciously if she gets a small number of likes on a photo, she will notice. Whether she realizes it or not, when a photo gets a record amount of likes, she all of the sudden feels really good about herself.
THIS IS NOT HOW IT SHOULD BE.
*Internal screaming.*
A person should not be gaining confidence through likes on a photo.
I want to repeat that.
A person should not be gaining confidence through likes on a photo.
So often I hear people tell me how excited they are to have 100 likes on a picture and I have to force myself not to take a switch to the back of their legs and knock some sense into them. Likes on a photo mean absolutely nothing. A lot of them might even come from a person accidentally double tapping their screen. When a person posts a selfie, they are expecting to get a certain amount of likes on it. Even my friend who denies caring about likes probably would delete a selfie if it got no likes on it. It’s a sad fact of the social media-consumed world that we live in.
Here is the paradoxical reality about people. Humans are self-absorbed. Which means that when a person does something self-absorbed such as posting a selfie, others don’t really care about it in the slightest because they are far too focused on themselves. Other people don’t really care that you feel confident today. Other people will genuinely become annoyed to see you trying to enter their world of egotism. That is really what social media is about, isn’t it? Showing off cool things in your life to others when in reality, others also want to show off themselves, so no one is actually giving a shit about how you look that day because they’re thinking probably about how they look in relation. It may make me sound incredibly cynical but that is honestly what I see happen every time a selfie is posted. It is a roundabout circle of no one caring and people creating empty fulfillment.