I joined Facebook few years after I got admission into this prestigious University of Ibadan; it was unlike several of my colleagues who were already recording close to a thousand friends at the same time. It was partly due to my inability to get a multimedia enabled phone prior at that time and my sustained focus at passing my GCE Certificate Exams.
I am an introvert; one who totally loves his privacy. So when I found a tool that could make me stay indoors and interact with the world at the same rate extroverts do in real life, I fell in love with it. I could meet people without seeing them eye to eye, I could read across platforms, I could be accepted without my flaws, and as a Muslim, interact with less transfer of vices; like I could be speaking with someone without being in his or her company. Life was perfect for my introverted self.
But it took me long before I came to reality with the seemingly perfect lives of the people on the social media. It began to seem to me like a charade, a façade at its best; the edited pictures, the endless adventures to city malls and city shindigs, the faultless lives, and the fact that almost every person is always at the heat of the moment, enjoying life at its peak.
That was however not the problem. I had begun to realize how exhilarated I was when accepting some people as friends, compared to others due to their profiles. It was an honour to have someone with thousands of friends send you a friend request compared to the indifference when someone with less than hundred friends appeared on your Facebook requests list. I had also seen friends jumping on their parents or uncles’ cars to take pictures meant for nothing but social media.
Facebook is unreal until you meet twitter. The twitter world is make-believe. A poverty stricken lady could be waking up in a Jacuzzi and be deciding whether to have a toast or eat out at a nearby restaurant that irritates her because their pizza list has no pepperoni. The updates are endless, so much you wonder if the country was now full of happy people, perfect people.
And with Instagram, life could not be less unreal. A life in captioned pictures tells all the story, so the energy people put into appearing to have the greatest lives possible cannot be undervalued. And thus, different pressures are set in the head of the social media consumer, the novice watching closely, or the expert whose brain has been eaten into.
THE PRESSURE TO IMPRESS
It cannot get harder on your brain when you begin to think you are in constant competition with Facebook friends or your newly acclaimed rivals. You are quick to post pictures of your new clothes, your new gadgets, or yourself in shopping malls or in any place whatsoever that makes it appear like you have “arrived”. You are quick to enter into trends that may or may not affect your lives. You pull off Halloween costumes even when you do not know what the festival is about. You talk about Aces and Chirocs, about the people in your community who refuse to move forward, you speak words easily attributed to foreign natives, and you participate in Ice Bucket Challenge just to reveal your celebrity status. You talk about things happening in America or Europe like they are happening in your sitting room. All because you want to get more likes, more retweets!
And you talk about money like it lives in your room! To your fans, you have money rolling in at will with some little or no sweat! You address celebrities like they live next door and you even pull off some level of arrogance. Yet you are a jobless dude hugging your device at best! Hustling to you means little than what is posted online. It sometimes means fraud. And when you are without all these for a period of time, it affects the way you think and mild depression may set in.
THE PRESSURE TO APPEAR PERFECT
The feelings of inadequacy and the pressure to enhance your physical appearance are impacts of social media in your lives; making your own profile look flawless so that others may look at it and feel inadequate and jealous. Your pictures take hours to edit. Your best pictures are taken against people’s cars, in other people’s lounges, in other people’s houses. You don’t eat such ridiculous things, and even when you eat garri, you put a show at it. You eat garri only when you crave it not because it is your only option and has been for several weeks. You are the fine girl with no pimple, with the life of excitement; a life lived as a wild child.
You are Mr Perfecto! The best there is! You have all six abs and a mighty chest. And your haircut is all because of your instagram picture. Life on Fridays is the greatest for you even though you know you are running errands for your parents. You no longer respect African values and call them archaic and unimaginable. Cars, babes and booze grace your cubicle! You are just the model everyone seeks! And you even speak American English!
You are Miss Perfecto! The best there is! You have the best curves! And you carefully select the clothes you wear for your social media pictures! Your push-up bras are always on call to reveal and push up your tiny breasts! And you’re there pouting, to make up for your ugly face. Others spend hours either editing their faces in real life or on their devices. It is a fake world and you know you’re struggling to live up to it. And African values and relationship traditions are a no-no for you. For some people that have married, their bid to live up to social media hype has broken such marriages and they now see no reason why they cannot jump from one marriage to another! Isnt it the celebrity life brought to you by social media productions!
And you begin to buy things to impress people you don’t know and who, after the swipe of their phone and after pushing like, have moved on with their lives. But you are all engaged in the theatrics and somewhere it is affecting some people’s lives. Winding into debts to impress, winding into bad decisions just to meet up with a life that was not made for them, lives that should never really have affected them.
THE PRESSURE OF ENVY
Yes! A lot of people begin to get jealous of these seemingly perfect, yet un-existing lives! They worry about their own lives, whether they have been cursed or something! Why it seems like they are the only ones who cannot have this or that, who cannot go for this or that. They no longer appreciate the little they have and they are sad about several things until they get close to the social media life. The envy becomes apparent! They find it difficult now to work hard to get successful! They want quick money, so they can also update their statuses and show themselves popping Aces in nightclubs, living life to the fullest and have nothing to worry about. When they don’t get this, several people get depressed from here.
How can a non-existing world affect people’s lives as such? But it is true. Many people’s lives are now dictated by social media. They can no longer think on their own. They no longer live for themselves; and just live for other people! They are dead but have their device holding-caricatures walking around! They have lost themselves and many do not find purpose.
The reality is that noone’s life is perfect. And the lesser you begin to live according to social media, the better. Examine yourself and check out the influence of social media on the decisions you are making and your willingness to go through life as it is.
Don’t let the social media continue to eat into your brain. Get offline and live a good life, a life without competition! A life of the real you!
HABEEB KOLADEis a Mechanical Engineering student, E-in-C at IndyPress, CEO at StrictlyUI Director of Marketing Communications, Geniuses NG, and Creative Director at Ivory Connect and AfriTV! Connect with me on twitter @Habeeb_X or on Facebook with the ID Habeeb Professorr X Kolade.
