Impact of Social Media On Self-Esteem
With the advancement of modern technology, social media has taken over all the aspects of our daily lives. Social Media has also been the center of debates for years now, and it has been associated with increasing depression, loneliness and lack of social skills.
Although social media platforms are filled with happy and adorable pictures of kittens, happy couples, healthy relationships, yet the reality seems to differ from the virtual world. This can easily be categorized as a paradoxical situation.
Why Is Social Media Causing an Increase in Depression?
Addiction to social media platforms, and a virtual life is slowly brainwashing people into forgetting physical and real-life interactions. People feel more comfortable expressing themselves online, behind a mask of anonymity, rather than confronting their issues head-on. Furthermore, users can choose to be whomever they wish to be on social media. The illusive freedom of a perfect virtual life is slowly causing them to rebel against the harshness of the reality.
For years now, advertisements have been criticized for offering and setting unrealistic standards for the general audience. This was a thing of the past. Nowadays, these idealistic standards are not being set by models or celebrities, but by our own colleagues, classmates, friends, and relatives.These people do have huge fan following, but they never post about their struggles and efforts. The only pictures you will ever see online would be edited and filtered. This causes depression and anxiety among other teenagers and viewers, who fail to match these standards, and are considered “different” or “ugly” by the society.
What Is Vanity Validation?
People create artificial and impractical personas online, in order to fill the gaps in their real ordinary lives. This slowly leads them towards living in a constantly delusional world, where they begin to believe in their virtual lives more than their real lives. This, in turn, makes them eager to seek validation online from strangers. Vanity validation has become a huge problem for teenagers nowadays, where they want to be praised, appreciated and heard online, and they give up on the practical expectations of their real lives.
Teenagers want to be rewarded and acclaimed for their posts and selfies online. Negative comments impact their personalities, and they tend to try harder to make the strangers feel happy through even more interesting posts. During all this struggle to be admired, they forget to take part in their real lives, and slowly, they become distant, cold and depressed in reality.
A Second Life:
Online media platforms are often viewed as modes of escapism. People originate and invent second lives online. They curate and control their online presence, and soon they begin making connections and friends. A teenager might have over 500 friends online on a social media website, but in reality, that teenager might have nobody to talk to.
This deceptive second life on social media platforms is slowly pushing people into the depths of loneliness, anxiety and sever chronic depression. An online presence lures teenagers into believing that they actually have charismatic lives in reality, and they expect to be appreciated for everything. However, when reality turns out be different that the virtual life, it become hard for them to deal with it, and they quickly retreat back into the comfortable arms of social media.
Couples might have cute pictures online, where the overall status quo of the relationship is portrayed as “the best”, but in reality, they find it hard to communicate and soon drift apart. Social Media is a destructive and an addictive method of escapism, which comes with long-lasting emotional damage.
