Social media is flooding out of our ears and reflecting back endlessly into our eyes and it's just sort of growing into a huge sticky puddle of prettiness.
It's pretty cool. It's pretty cool that we can tap a few buttons on a screen and zip our precious pretty pictures all over the internet for other people to ogle over. It's pretty cool that we can share thoughts and emotions and connect with people from all over the place and post images and words whenever and wherever we like. It's pretty cool but it's also pretty scary and mostly, pretty inaccurate.
It's becoming increasingly difficult to go a day without scanning over a photograph of a tanned flat-stomached beachy babe posing with a green juice, or a perfectly set up selection of colourful healthy food that looks more like a painting than something edible. We obsess over other people's lives online, checking to see what people are up to, checking to see where they are, who they're with, what they're eating, what they're wearing. The trouble is, social media doesn't give us an accurate representation of people. Sure, we can gather roughly what a person looks like, where they spend their time, what they like to eat. But really, the proper human being can't really be discovered through a series of brightly coloured photographs.
The people that we spend so much of our time staring at, are not real. They are a tiny snippet of a version of themselves. People don't post photographs of themselves at 6 in the morning as they roll over with knotty hair and puffy eyes to grab a sip of water. They don't post pictures of them sitting down when their tummies pooch out a little at the bottom. They don't post pictures of the peanut butter sandwiches that they slap together in 2 minutes before running out the door to go to work.
People post what they want you to see. They post things that are pretty- the best versions of themselves and the best versions of their lives.
Scrolling through an Instagram feed, you would assume that people live in gorgeous bubbles of happy prettiness. The thing is, on social media, you don't see people with all their demotions. You don't see them move or smile, you don't see the real texture of their skin or the movement of their hair or the wrinkles on their faces. You don't see people living, you see flat people. And these 2D people are only fragments of what it is to be a living breathing human being.
Pretty pictures are great. Really super great, and I love them. But it's important to remind yourself that a pretty picture is just a pretty picture. You can't base your opinion of a person's life on their beautifully constructed Instagram feed.
Share your pretty pictures babes, but hold onto all your realness too.
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