In a world where likes feel like love, many women are learning to measure their worth in pixels instead of personhood. It starts with a scroll. One second, you are watching a girl’s “5 A.M. Wellness Routine,” and the next you are wondering why you have not journaled in weeks or why your matcha tastes like milk. Social media was supposed to make us feel connected and confident. Instead, it is quietly teaching us how to perform those feelings. Growing up in a world where social media is held to a standard of priority, communication, it is easy for it to consume our lives and for us to forget where we came from.
Being born in 2006 means growing up with the latest technology always around and being developed because of the new era I was born into. Being surrounded by this heavily shaped what media I consumed and how I used it because it was practically all I knew. I went from having an iPhone 5S and using silly Snapchat filters on the school bus with friends, to staring at one hundred mirror pictures I’ve taken, deleting eighty of them because of critiques I feared I would gain online. I no longer looked into mirrors for validation. Instead, I sought it out from profile visits, comments, and engagements on my social media accounts. As college women, we grew up online—our self-worth shaped by likes, filters, and the need to achieve that “it girl” aesthetic. Social media has become our mirror, but what we see in it isn’t always real.
I believe that social media taught women to love themselves but also gave us a thousand new ways to compare ourselves. Living in the mindset of “not looking good enough to post” comes from beauty standards we see on every social media platform and developing the mentality that everything we post must be perfectly curated in order to meet those standards. We are constantly put into a comparison trap from influencers we thought we could see ourselves in.
Let’s be real—influencers are still performing. Some may be authentic, but even their content is still perfectly curated. Influencers who brand their vulnerability by posting “relatable” crying selfies edit out the real puffy eye bags and blood-shot eyes for their Tumblr feed vibe. The content we are fed is often targeted towards a certain audience of women and never for everyone. The only content we can learn and should take advice from is from ourselves. We are the raw, unedited version of ourselves that we should pour into more.
As we begin to realize who we really are and take back the confidence that was always ours, we need to reclaim reality. Unfollow the accounts that drain you because the algorithm doesn’t care about our confidence—it cares for our attention. Curate spaces that make you feel human, not polished. Post that picture without staring at it for too long. Empowerment isn’t about proving we’re picture perfect; it is about realizing we never had to be. Our generation has learned to edit everything: our photos, our words, and even our truths. But together we can make sure that the next era of empowerment isn’t about editing—it’s about existing, unapologetically, and unfiltered.