Authentic Self

I had just gotten off the phone with a friend, where we were chatting about the negative effects social media has on us, and then I open my laptop to read these assigned readings and they perfectly correlate with what I was just discussing. The irony! Anyways, I just felt like that was too funny not to share. 

A key idea I took away from these articles, (all of which, I would like to mention, I found extremely interesting), is the problem within differentiating authenticity. We are all so caught up in perfecting an online presence that we lose sight of our personal authenticity. We focus more on how people view us, than how we view ourselves. I often hear the phrase, "Do it for the 'gram," implying that you should only partake in certain activities for the sole purpose of posting it to Instagram. Because of this, sometimes your online self doesn't quite align with your real world self. You lose sight of your authenticity.

At the beginning of the semester, when I saw everyone moving back to their college towns and moving into apartments with their three best friends, I began to feel sad. I saw everyone having so much fun and living so independently all over Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. They were posting pictures of their cute, decorated, new rooms. Selfies of them and their roommates flooded my feeds. And I felt envious. I felt sad that I was still living at home, in the town that I grew up in, not experiencing any of that. I fed into this idea that they were enjoying life more than I was, that their life was better than mine because of how they portrayed it online. But, I had to remind myself that not everything is as it seems. I connected this personal experience with the findings in the article, "Will Facebook Make You Sad? Depends How You Use It". I agree with the statement, "Grazing on the content of other people’s idealized lives may make reality painful". And it did, until I reminded myself that these people were only posting the positives that were going on in their lives. I shouldn't be envious of a life where I am ignorant beyond what they portray online.