In our modern and fast-paced world, it is easy to feel like you are being left behind. The pressure of constantly trying to fit in with the rest of our youth takes a heavy mental and physical toll on us. In trying to succeed and outshine and become noticeable, youngsters often forget that in this storybook of our individual lives, we are already the main characters.
This rat race can become incredibly toxic. While youngsters walk around seeking validation and comfort from people or things that don’t even matter, we are unintentionally crippling ourselves from giving us the love that we need. The number of likes, followers, and how many people watch your stories in a day can become a deadly vice. But why are we so hell-bent on showing everyone that we are, in fact, having a good time in our life, when we usually are not. Or even if we are, what’s the use of putting it up on social media? Who even cares?
This is the youth’s greatest enemy — social media. And it’s just crazy. A single app determines your worth and makes you share every part of your life — happy or sad while making you feel like you are not interesting enough. What is the point of going out, if all you do is pose for pictures where you suck your tummy in and try to look good? Who’s going to eat the food and carry on the conversation? Where are the laughs and the jokes being cracked? Where is the fulfilment of feeling like you had a good time? It’s just not there. Why? Because you were trying to create the illusion of having a good time so that your followers could see you when in fact all you did was pose for about 200 pictures and probably hated 199 of them. This absolutely is unfair to you. You are a part of today’s youth and you don’t even feel like you are enough. And that’s not true. What you have is something that others don’t have, so why are you trying to prove to them that you’re just as basic and common as them? It really pains my heart to see so many of us trying so hard to pretend that we fit in. We see people online having fun, and it changes our whole definition of fun. Are we so gullible, naïve, and without substance that we now have to adopt other people’s feelings as well? So captivated by online influencers and fashion gurus are our youth that we let them dictate how to feel about the most precious things in our life — our body, our mind, and our soul, and that is the epitome of injustice towards ourselves. Youngsters are so progressive yet so backward in many ways. While they easily grasp the concept of social media and pictures, they have trouble communicating with friends and family when some issues crop up.
Our youth has learnt to disregard and discard the emotions of “friends” that they do not agree with. So, as we become shallower, we earn more shallow people as friends who stay around us, making us feel like we need to try harder and run faster in this race to keep up with what the youth deem as “cool”. The empty feeling that you’re going to feel after one more day of Instagram worthy stories is because you are chronically hurting yourself by pushing everything that makes you a shallow person — as if we don’t have enough of them. We, humans, are sociable creatures — we need to connect on a soul level and we need to make meaningful bonds.
Let’s remind ourselves that we are special in our own way. Pushing away our inner individualistic selves and dreams will only make us feel like we are never enough because we, ourselves, do not enjoy chasing the prize that everyone wants. It is always good to remember that if life is an amusement park, some rides are meant for you while others are not.