You've seen glamorous pictures of their cars, watches, and handbags (and other things from www.uncrate.com - which by the way is an excellent site to while away the time).
Or perhaps watched the latest 'stories' of linen-clad ‘frienemies’ traversing the Moroccan plains atop a camel. Maybe nothing too rich, just a good-looking former colleague armed with her silky-haired squad hitting the clubs every weekend, and you look at yourself, slumped on the couch with a bag of potato chips watching Netflix (or worse, endlessly scrolling through for something to watch).
Yep. We've all seen these pictures and most of us are guilty of it.
Social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram inadvertently foster comparisons with your peers. You think, “Why can’t my life be as fun and exciting?” And you start to make plans to skip lunches to save up for a holiday to take twice as many photos, with your new skinny body of course. Or you blow your bonus on that much-vaunted 2.55 alligator bag in gold.
But still we constantly scroll through our feeds looking at the polished pictures of our peers. The cycle (and the feed) is endless.
Why?
Like Thanos, we want to reshape reality. We want to convince our friends and family that we are a certain person whether or not that might be true. We might even believe that we are the image that we create for ourselves. In a world of smartphones and selfies, where our identities are equated with our social media profiles, who’s to know what we are or aren’t?
But are we truly living happy lives?
A study conducted in 2015 found a strong correlation between authenticity and self-esteem. People felt better about themselves if they believed they were living authentic lives; if they thought they were true about themselves.
What is an authentic life? One philosopher thought an authentic life involved making choices based on your own values, rather than in accordance with the values of anyone else.
But almost every photograph on Facebook or Instagram is a filtered version of reality – there literally are dozens of filters to choose from to edit a photograph. They are also filtered because people only want the positive on display. Perhaps what wasn’t shown to you was how disastrously smelly that Moroccan camel was, how many times she puked along Jiak Kim Street after Mambo Night, or how many installments are left on that BMW. Our quest to emulate the lives of these people becomes meaningless because the very thing we seek to recreate is not real.
We would all be a lot happier (and richer) if we stopped trying to live like the people we follow on social media. Live life on our own terms, simply and without reference to others (said no professor ever).
In the wise words of Heidegger the philosopher, “The path we follow is always of our own choosing. We should never allow our fears or the expectations of others to set the frontiers of our destiny.”