In its starting phase, social media was a blessing. It connected friends and family. But soon, we began to see human nature in an amplified form. The facelessness of the Internet made them do things that they wouldn’t do in real life.

It is a primal nature of humans to get validation from other humans. Internet increased our connections by a large magnitude. To impress everyone, people started making their life miserable. Followers count has become a new vanity metric.

As Dave Ramsey said,

We buy things we don’t need with money we don’t have to impress people we don’t like.

The social media influencer fits this criterion. Their job is to show their lavish and luxurious life to gain followers. Many a time, things are different in reality. It shocks us when we hear about bankruptcy, divorces or suicides of these influencers. It is then we realise how everyone is living the same life full of different struggles. But then we again come to our primal instinct and begin to compare ourselves with someone else.

This fakeness is also increasing discontentment leading to anxiety and depression. Seeing everybody enjoying their life makes us sad about our monotonous life. It is having a negative impact on teenagers. They want to be like their favourite star on Instagram without knowing reality. Many of them have a skewed view of themselves and suffers from anxiety, depression and anorexia.

It needs conscious efforts from our side to combat the effects of social media. We need to monitor the time spent on Facebook, Instagram and other social apps. Even when using these apps, filter out all the toxic people on the platform.

We need to take action; otherwise, social media will gobble up all our attention. The byproduct that will be left is discontent and depressed adult searching for validation.