Don’t Waste Time Perfecting Your Social Media Presence

By Alisa Pierce
Blog Content Contributor

Social media has taken over our generation, and there have been some unexpected side effects.One of the side effects that has affected almost everyone I know in a very negative way is that people have become obsessed with the aesthetic value of popular Instagram posts. We pay attention to what these posts depict because we think they’ll show us how to make our lives as perfect as those in the pictures. We get so caught up in all of the attention these users get that that we think our posts should be as similar to there’s as possible. We’ve forgotten that these posts are edited to look perfect and that the users are people just like us. Fortunately, if our pictures don’t match theirs, or our posts don’t get as many likes, our lives aren’t any less valuable than theirs. 

Creating a perfect profile to convince the world that I’m as perfect as everyone else has become a huge part of my social media experience. It’s tempting to buy into the lie that we have to portray a perfect life through our posts. For a long time, I thought that my self worth was defined by my social media presence. Getting a ton of likes on my selfies made me feel better about my image, and seeing that someone else has more followers than me would make me feel less valuable. However I’ve realized that the real life behind what is shown on social media is probably a lot farther from perfect than we think. The pictures we see on social media just show the nice parts of someone’s life while hiding all of the ugly. People post thing that makes themselves look good.

At the end of the day, they are just posts. These posts look great but that doesn’t mean that their lives are as perfect as they seem. Even if they were, your life is just as valuable no matter how many likes someone else gets. Your life shouldn’t be defined by what you post or who likes it. Creating the perfect social media presence is time consuming and unhealthy, so don’t buy into the lie that you have to post perfect pictures all of the time. I promise, it’s not worth it.