The Long Road Ahead

Why are people not their real selves?

Why use your social media like a highly curated art Gallery? It’s not a picture album! I tend to think it’s a scrapbook my way of thinking is that in todays society which is highly driven by online influencer culture wher you get shown how to dress, how to look, and how to act!

When I bought myself a new phone I said to myself and others that I’d document my recovery, plus things I found interesting.

Do you know what happened?

I did Nothing of the sort I was too scared to show people that I wasn’t doing as good as I thought or maybe that people would unfollow me yes me with like 12 followers having that fear of rejection of losing even 1 follower weighed so much on me so I only wrote on the good things not even the things I find interesting or that I enjoy I had to keep up those appearances.

All because I didn’t want to lose even 1 follower keeping in mind that the majority of my followers probably never see my post or don’t care about them. And who could blame them firstly we’ve been brought up in this culture of “social glamour” everything has to be perfect or seem perfect.

It’s such a poisonous outlook on the world meanwhile I’m at the point where I don’t even care about what colour socks I put on each morning nevermind what picture out of the last 20-30 makes me look the best but this is the culture you know I listened to podcasts that have women influencers on and they get asked about the things they post often the answer is that they would post a photo of themselves in jeans and a hoodie and get 10k likes but post themselves in a bikini or athleisure wear and get 50-100k likes.

The worst part about it is that it’s a feedback loop for not only yourself but all of the people involved. Influencers set such high standards of lifestyle & beauty for the fans to follow those standards right into their adult lives and so on it doesn’t stop!

An idea of what to aim for

There’s this quote by Tim Ferris on his idea of 1000 true fans and I take it further in this case in terms of friends/fans if you post 3 times a week for a week and each post gets 50-100 likes and then you post 1 of your “best” photos and it gets like 300-500 likes I would say that those 50-100 are your true friends/fans.

That’s not to say you can’t do this. I’m not trying to make you stop posting the best photos of yourself but my argument is to post the things you like not just what you think would be liked more also you may find people who share similar interests and hobbies to you as well.

Now I’m very much in the starting area of my outlook on social media but at this moment when I post something I stop caring (mostly) about what I post and just post things that make kinda happy quotes, my ever-growing TCG collection, and these posts, will be posting more me pictures now that things aren’t seeming as dire IRL *fingers crossed* another thing with me is that sometimes I just can’t be bothered but hey that’s a work in progress.

Changing this outlook on social media

Instagram has now introduced a feature to let you hide the number of likes you get on your posts so if you often find this metric to be daunting now you try Instagram in this new way. here is an article and guide on how to enable it. So for me, it’s a little different from the instruction of this article on my Samsung S20 To do this in the app, go to Settings —> Privacy  —>Posts at least that is how I enable it.

At least that’s my goal after this post I’m going to hide likes on my posts for at least the next month and see how I feel about it not being there after which I will review it to figure out if it’s going to be a permanent function.