I count myself among the large majority of our generation who are continuously struggling to find the balance between loving and hating social media. Those of us who have grown up in the digital age, constantly getting stories about how detrimental social media is to our development and self-esteem shoved down our throats, understand that it is less of a wide plain of possibility and more of a tightrope between hobby and addiction that we walk every day.
Almost everyone my age, either voluntarily or volun-told by their parents, like I was, watched the 2020 documentary The Social Dilemma. If your experience was anything like mine, this film may have radicalized your household into one that was extremely anti-social media. Growing up in a family that was already mostly analog, this documentary was like the final blow to seal the deal on how the modern iPhone, with its Twitter and Snapchat, was going to rot everyone’s brains.
Because it came out in 2020, The Social Dilemma found its way into my home and onto my parents’ TV during a time when I was already familiar with social media and had formed my own opinions about the pros and cons, despite my parents’ refusal to allow me a phone until the eighth grade. Then, I disagreed with a lot of what the film had to say, and thought that it dramatized an issue that was not as big of a deal as it was made to seem. After all, I wasn’t counting my likes on every Instagram post and feeling horrible when I lost a follower.
Recently, however, I have been thinking a lot about conversations that my family had after watching The Social Dilemma, and wondering if all of those scientifically researched points may hold true. I know, duhhhh. I still don’t think that the narrative that social media is all bad is true, but I have noticed a degree of negative fallout. What I struggle with the most is maintaining a balance between using social media, more specifically Instagram, as a platform for expression, and letting myself get sucked into the rabbit holes that are so easily discovered on Reels.Â
The Tightrope
After I deleted TikTok when it was banned earlier this year, I started to wonder what interested me about social media. My greatest time-consuming app was gone, and once I got rid of it, I started to think about just deleting Instagram, too. Snapchat, for me, was already basically useless, so that was the second pillar to fall in my cleanse, but something has always held me back from deleting Instagram entirely.Â
I have always thought of it as my favorite app, a place where people can express themselves, however vain it may expose them to be. Instagram, logically or not, has always felt less soul-sucking than all the others to me. In a world where everything is so constantly digitalized, I often think of it as the last space available for the general public to create art. Even if that “art” is reposting a hanus string of brainrot.
Even though I love it, I do admit, finding the balance between expressing versus comparing myself has always been difficult. I think, when it comes to social media, that is always the hardest part: understanding that your life and the portrayed life of whoever you are watching are simply incomparable because one will never see the full picture. I have fallen prey a thousand times to comparing my body, or my skin, or my clothes, or anything else plausible, to the people I see online, a pitfall of social media that I think is talked about so often people forget that it is actually happening to them. It is almost subconscious, the act of taking stock of everything you have and comparing it to the perfectly edited life of someone else, where, most of the time, you will come up short.
For this reason, I have been returning to the constant weighing of the scales, attempting to find an equilibrium using social media as a creative outlet, but also trying to avoid falling into the predictable algorithm of self-hatred that is all too easy to get whisked away by.
Don’t GAF!
One of my favorite people on this Earth once told me that the worst thing that a person can do for their mental health when using social media is care. As philosophical and indie as it sounds, it truly was one of the best pieces of advice I ever received. As soon as I started treating my Instagram as a place to post cool pictures and my favorite songs, and ONLY that, I found that so many of the things that I hated about social media were less prominent.
They are still there, of course, and I often find myself dragged into a doomscroll before bed, but I really learned how to care less about who viewed or liked or commented or swiped up on whatever. As a once very creative artistically inclined person who now finds her most creative outlet writing for this very magazine, I get to make my Instagram my art project. Treat it like a scrapbook! Have fun.Â
I think that what made social media work for me was, for starters, deleting a vast majority of the apps that I had, but more importantly, taking what Instagram did to me and turning it into what it can do for me. It can serve as a creative outlet, a way of staying connected with people, a digital archive, and so many more things, literally just whatever YOU want it to be.Â