I made a promise to myself and to the small sphere of people that I influence. To open myself up to be vulnerable through my life as I live it out and through what I post on social media.
I gave myself a goal to be 100% authentic. What you see on my social is 100% accurate, nothing is a highlight reel to distract you from the imperfections of my life.
With that being said, some of you might have noticed I haven’t been very active on social media for the last 5 months. But I want to specifically want to talk about the last month. For the past few months I was very inactive but recently I decided to delete Instagram and Youtube.
Why did I do that?
Let me talk about each one separately. For Youtube, I follow a lot of vloggers. I by no means want to become a vlogger but it got to the point where I was watching vlogs every single day but what I didn’t realize that it was affecting my life around me. I started becoming slightly depressed, I’d get angry easily with family and friends, I wasn’t satisfied with the community that I had and longed to have a community like the ones in the videos I was watching.
For Instagram, it got to the point where my natural instinct when I had nothing to do was to scroll through Instagram. I would spend a lot of the time looking at the lives of other people. Now there is nothing wrong with that but over a prolonged time it can become very toxic and all you start to do is focus on other people’s lives. Slowly but surely your mindset begins to change and you become somewhat unimpressed with your life. I became trapped into thinking that everyone’s “highlight reels” were all that they experienced in life.
Now….
Please note: I am in no way saying social media is wrong. I am merely trying to show what can happen if you consume too much of one thing.
So….
I want to give you THREE things I learnt from this experience:
- Social Media can distract you from your own life.
When you consume too much social media, your focus in life shifts. You no longer focus on what’s happening in your own life rather the lives of other people. The way you treat people begins to change because the people you see online seem so “perfect” that the real people in your life begin to not seem that great.
2. Social Media can make your life feel insignificant.
This constant viewing of people’s highlight reels can make you think that’s all that they experience in life and that you are the only one going through hard times. You start to believe that a perfect life is something that you should strive for and that it is an achievable goal.
But I want to tell you, as I mentioned in a previous blog….. “We’re not meant to live life avoiding imperfection, it’s how we navigate through those imperfections that make us human.”
3. Social media can give you a warped sense of reality.
During this cycle of looking at someone else’s life, feeling down, thinking your life isn’t that great and then doing that over again, your sense of reality begins to change. You start to believe that there is a greater life out there than the one you are in right now. The “virtual highlight reel” world that you constantly watch starts to become your reality.
….
So in light of all that, I want to quickly tell you these few things.
You are where you need to be. There is no such thing as a “greater” life out there. Your life is as great as you make it to be. If you live your life focusing on the lives of other people you’ll miss out making your own life great. Appreciate the real people around you. There are people that love you, don’t miss out on the opportunity to love them back.
