Growing up is difficult for anyone, but when you grow up in a world where the internet is one of your parental figures, it makes the journey of knowing who you are that much harder.
One of the biggest concepts I took away from my psychology class was that reputation and character are two different things. Reputation is how other people view us. A bad reputation can be caused by other people wanting to elevate their own social status. Reputations can be ruined with untruths. We all have online reputations. We’re all connected in a way based on how we are perceived, but unless we meet someone in real life, we don’t really know them. If we’re always online, our reputations cloud our character and feel like the same thing. How can we find out who we are if we’re confusing who we are with who other people think we are? The answer: we can’t. On social media sites, growing up in our teen years, we put our character to the side to focus on our reputation and what the world sees us as, even if it isn’t true.
On Instagram, for example, we create posts to make sure we always look happy, even if it means faking it. We put filters on our beach photos to look unbelievably thin. We show our strengths and never our weaknesses. But in order to come of age, we need to acknowledge our weaknesses. Posts that aren’t scandalous, posts that don’t include lots of friends, and posts that don’t have cool captions, all get less “likes.” Psychologically, we all are social and we all have a human need to be accepted. Low numbers of “likes” translate to us believing people don’t like us. We falsely assume how many followers we have is how many friends we have in real life.
People want to be pretty, popular, and smart. They’re so focused on that goal that they never take the time to find out who they really are, only who they want to be. They need to spend more time with family and friends and on their own identifying their true self. That’s how you grow up. But with the screen constantly there to tempt us, it’s like we don’t even have the time to be alone.
There’s a lack of privacy in social media to the point that if you make one little mistake, the whole world remembers you for that mistake. If you make a misstatement in a tweet or make an incorrect post, people start coming at you with negative comments until you believe them.
You can’t escape social media. Bad comments that amplify insecurities are always there. I’ve taken social media breaks and found it was great for my mental health. Growing up in this super hyper-online and always-connected world, I’ve had to separate myself from what people think of me online. That’s how I found who I was.