The terms of social media: a voluntary death
The problem we most often associate with social media is the utopian life that ubiquitously presents itself on all of these digital platforms like Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat and so forth. And that is indeed a huge problem, to have kids as much as adults exposed to these product-oriented outputs (meaning: we don’t see behind the photo or video, we don’t see the process) that we compare ourselves to. When one thinks about it, it is quite obvious that this exposure to such selected semi-realities eventually leads to depression as you start to question yourself, your looks, your life, and become insecure and dissatisfied with everything you do, have and are. And thus, just like that, every time you open the app you kill yourself bit by bit.
This trend of comparing ourselves and our lives to surreal, utopian standards and ideals is a huge issue which we must sensor and tackle. Yet, a lesser discussed issue with social media is the tremendous effect it has not on being jealous and setting our standards up to a utopian reality, but by giving us this wrong impression of freedom.
Social media makes us indecisive. We’ve all heard the sentence before that “you can be anyone and have anything” and if we haven’t, the marketing professionals out there make sure to get us to believe this in a somehow more subtle way through billboards and algorithms.
Social media, especially Instagram, is a platform that holds millions of identities. It is like back in the days when us 90es kids would play Sims and have the full catalogue to choose from to create our avatar. There is bankers, models, athletes, mothers, poets, photographers, carpenters, politicians… everyone on one surface, one platform, like a catalogue we can choose from. The problem is not just that we compare ourselves to the looks of the superficial and edited models or to that one billionaire who’s seemingly got it all. But the greater problem lies beyond that, it is what follows our newly created insecurities and dissatisfaction based on that utopian comparison. As we go on with our discontent life in reality, virtually we are presented with this huge range of avatars we could be or become. It sends us up into this lifted space where, as we scroll, we dream and wonder who we want to be. Who we want to be in order to be finally happy and free. One day it’s the athlete we like so much, the other day a family father, then a bikini shop owner, a finance guru and the next the isolated poet who lives in a forest hut away from civilisation…
Thus, we sit there, scrolling and scrolling… And because of that infinite scroll, we never leave the dreaming sphere but infinitely wonder, who we want to become ourselves. Just like in Sylvia Plath’s image of the fig tree, life moves on and we never manage to be but always dream of becoming, until one day it is too late.
Our generation is marked by the multitude of possibilities we can choose from. Alain Ehrenberg explained quite well in his book “The Exhausted Self” how we transitioned from a society and generation of a collective with traditions and set values given by a state or entity, towards a society of individuals where each and every one is responsible for their own standards and luck. Thus, we have no-one and nothing, no traditions, religions or collective that narrows down who we can be and what we can do and have. This opens a vast ocean of possibilities – some are more real than others - which is detrimental to our mental health.
Maybe being in this limbo-state, this caged freedom we put ourselves in, is even more destructive for our soul and life than the comparison of looks and things as it is the foundation of comparison itself. If we do not limit our possibilities, we will never stop comparing ourselves. We need to live by principles and values. But how can we have any of these if we don’t limit ourselves, don’t judge our options? We have entered this age where judgement is judged and thus, everything needs to go, everything is ok. But who the hell are these people who tell us not to judge and judge us for having values and principles? What a strange world we live in! It is just as “preaching water, drinking wine”. It is like the “socialists” who want an equal world with no judgement and where everyone is accepted, yet they tell me I have to let go of my faith in order to fit in with them. What a strange world we live in.
Judging people is bad. However judging motives, options and actions not generally. We live in a polarised world where we can either be or not be, either accept everything or be a discriminator. The foundation of this polarisation is possibly an increase of vague borders in every aspect of our modern lives. A rapper and entrepreneur might as well be a politician, a woman can be a man and vice-versa and everything in between, a person can master nothing and still influence us…
It lies in our nature that we categorise people and things. In the early ages we’d separate things in “safe” and “dangerous”. When we are born as babies we only know “attention” and “death”, when we get older we’re told that some things are “good” and others are “bad”, “right” and “wrong”. Us humans need some sort of framework to cope with the influx of information from all channels, we are strictly designed that way. Yet, in our day and age, we have an increased desire to open up our world and ourselves to every single thing. We want to strip ourselves from our most urgent need, our basis for staying alive, by detaching ourselves from the sole ability we were gifted with by birth which is to judge. Maybe we have come this far because we are all vulnerable and afraid of judgement. So in order to protect ourselves, we deny ourselves from any right to judge anything or anyone else. Or maybe we took this right away because we thought this might help us prevent war. In a world where everything goes, how could there be a misunderstanding or argument?
But we are so naive. It is sad to see. We believe we can change anything because we already have and are, such as the climate, the gender, the nature of giving birth, the real, the power…. No wonder we believe that we can even change human’s most evident trait that nature has embedded within us which is the ability to judge situations and things, which is our instinct. We would never have come this far if we couldn’t have made the separation of “dangerous animal” to “safe shelter”. We could never have built our society this way if it wasn’t for our ability to judge. Our survival instinct is driven by our instinctive judgment of what is “good” and “bad”. Without moral, we could never have survived.
The problem of blocking ourselves from the channel we were and still are born with today, denying ourselves from basing ourselves on moral reasoning, we are actually killing ourselves slowly, as a society. Not one society survived that had no moral judgement. So we have to question whether we really want to participate in our own mass murder or go back to the survival by instinct which is ultimately how we are designed to act and live. And of course, by surviving and dying I don’t mean that this century we will be eaten by wild animals because of our lack of judgment. But we will be first tortured and then eaten alive by our own kind, by the people in charge such as politicians, billionaires, tech companies, algorithms and AI.
