by Tink Blauth-Muszkowski
The blood-curdling scream of your morning alarm jolts you awake. It’s Monday. A long week of work looms before you like a thick fog. You hear the pitter patter of rain outside and know that soon, you are going to be out there, joining the other miserable commuters. All that awaits you outside your warm, comfy bed is the pile of emails you avoided on Friday afternoon, so you could bunk off early to get to the pub.
But before all that, you slide the ‘alarm off’ located on your smartphone—the inanimate object that is no longer just that, but an extension of your arm, a third hand, the quintessential essence of your being. Without even thinking, your thumb presses the Instagram logo, muscle memory serving you well. You scroll through, looking at beach snaps, six-pack abs, and a cashmere jacket so breath-taking, you can almost feel its softness through the screen. The images passing by are posted by a collision; of celebrities, Instagram models, close friends and that girl you met when your flight was delayed coming back from Ibiza.
You look back outside to the rain and think of those emails. You put your phone down and hide under your covers, asking yourself how you got here and why you aren’t an Instagram model sunning it up in the Bahamas with one of the Ryans on your arm (Gosling, Reynolds, Kwanton) wearing a Louis Vuitton bikini.
This scene, I am pretty sure, is happening every morning, across many, many homes, affecting a generation of young men and women. Yet nobody is asking the question: Why are we not doing more damage control to stop social media from having such a profound effect on us?
When I talk about social media, I am referring to the big guns: Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat. The list, however, is endless, as more and more apps are being created. And they are intended to lure us into a false sense of security that we need them, to keep in touch with our nearest and dearest.
I have been ghosting these platforms for nearly a year now and feel a mixture of emotions about the future of our relationship. They certainly do not make my life any better, but I keep wondering if cold turkey really is the way forward and if I will ever sever my ties with it.
I first made the decision to take a break about eighteen months ago, with just Facebook in mind. It was whilst scrolling through status updates, holiday snaps and celebrity pages that I realised I didn’t care for a good number of the people whose posts I was seeing because they no longer played a significant role in my life. Yet, for some reason, I was irrationally angry with what I was looking at. I don’t know why I cared, but Lily getting engaged to her vanilla boyfriend, Steve, set me off on a rampage. Why was she getting her fairy-tale ending when I was still waiting to get a text off a guy I had been on a date with on Saturday? I don’t even get on with Lily, I have never met said boyfriend-now-fiancée and would definitely not be getting a call to the wedding. Yet, this one post of detailing how he had got down on one knee in Central Park (original) had sent me spiralling into a very dark place I did not need to go to. Lily and I are not close-enough friends and I would never get to hear this story from the horse’s mouth. At best I would hear it third-hand over coffee with my girlfriends who would touch on the subject for a nano-second and then get back to discussing the more pressing matter of whether the barista really was giving Jen ‘the eye’. Why did learning a piece of information about someone I no longer had a relationship with put me in such disarray? Why had I pushed myself into such a situation?
Social media, for better or worse, keeps you continually connected to almost every person you have come into contact with. I have 1,019 friends on Facebook. However, I can count on my fingers and toes the number of people I speak to and meet on a regular basis. I could tell you what all those people are up to through what they post online, even though I have not seen some of them since the party where we met over a decade ago. However, what my connections share in itself is a filter—people manipulate and control what they want and don’t want to share about their life. Ever been to a pretty crap party and then see photos go up online, making it look like another Friday night at Hugh Hefner’s mansion? People want you to think they are ‘living their best life’ and that the brunches, cocktail nights and cosy movies are picture perfect. The reality of this, however, is left cropped out and cowering behind the ‘X-Pro II’ filter.
This filtering is at the core of the problem. In effect, our superficial side which we present to the world through social media is far more interesting than the live show. In order to belong, we are forced to project our life as ‘perfect’ to each other, not stopping to consider the emotionally damaging consequences. Life isn’t blemish-free, everyone fights, glasses get broken and lipstick gets stuck on teeth, so why don’t we want to show that side of ourselves? The flawless picture that we are giving of our lives is in fact hurting the people we love most. Who is to say that Lily’s engagement went off without a hitch? Maybe she hesitated before answering, hadn’t had her nails done or the ring didn’t fit the first time around? These are details that those of us totally distant from her will never find out; but we will suffer the heartbreak of believing that her life is first-class, whilst ours is probably going down the drain.
Of course, there is an argument to be had; that I could control my emotions and quite easily unfollow her and not allow myself to get caught up in it all. But I’m not sure if unfollowing is something I really want to do. Being an old friend, I feel a sense of loyalty and camaraderie, which makes it hard for me to unfollow Lily. Due to us being intrinsically connected from a young age, there is something heartbreaking about unfollowing her and removing her from my life. In my mind, unfollowing is the same kind of social faux-pas as walking past an acquaintance in the street and not stopping to say hello and finding out how they are. Despite it being incredibly unlikely that Lily would know I have unfollowed her, I feel the act itself is saved only for nasty ex-boyfriends and friends who sleep with said nasty ex-boyfriends. Social media seems to expect us to act spontaneously on any emotion we feel at that moment with little room for thought: once you hit that ‘unfollow’ button there is no way back; the person may not get a notification but if one day in the future you want to re-follow, they will. That notification says ‘I forgive you’, but gives no details as to why they were rejected in the first place. Unlikely as it is that I might want to re-follow them, I find it uncomfortable. Instead, by staying away from social media, I can avoid confessing the sins of unfollowing someone because by default I have ‘unfollowed’ everyone and don’t need to keep track of whom I’ve unfollowed or why I haven’t seen their posts.
As if relationships weren’t hard enough to manage through these platforms, the social media game changed dramatically a few years ago when advertising and celebrity endorsements threw their hat in the ring. Along with following friends, we also follow celebrities and brands that we love, therefore opening up a whole other world that we cannot obtain. Our friends from Made In Chelsea and Love Island convince us if we drink this tea or buy that dress, we will look just like them and have their lifestyle. Spoiler alert—I bought the dress, and the tea; and trust me, nothing has changed other than the fact that I have a new dress and some new tea. This realisation is yet another damage to our sense of selves and confidence.
Have you ever stopped to wonder why social media is free? We aren’t the consumer, we are the product, selling ourselves to our friends daily. Posting a ‘Throwback Thursday’ picture from your holiday is very likely to push your friend to book a trip and post a picture from a party, giving someone else the idea to host another party the following week. Many of us eat what we see our friends and heroes eating, not giving a second thought to what the actual nutritional value is.
Despite all this, we still have fallen down the rabbit hole and I don’t know if we have a way out. I am successfully off Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat. Facebook has proved much more trying due to the ‘Events’ element to it; in order to not miss out on real-life, human get-togethers, I have to periodically get on to Facebook and check if I have been invited to things. Turning my back on social media has been harder than I thought as it’s tough to make everyday conversation without references to social media happenings. For instance, when people are asking ‘Did you see what so and so posted on Insta?’, I end up feeling clueless when they are referencing both friends as well as celebrity culture. I am forced to miss out on certain things now because I am no longer ‘online’. Twitter has taken to being a place where jobs are posted; am I now missing out on career opportunities too? Social media is so embedded in our daily lives, is it even possible to block them all and really walk away? I am on my way to finding out.
