Authenticity
There’s a few ways I can tell I’m getting older: my joints crack when I stand up, I started drinking beet juice and I kind of enjoy it (unsure of when I became a grandma) and I’m stuck in the nostalgia of the old days. Why is it that every time I take a look back I’m convinced life was just easier? It’s not even that it was easier but there was so much less pressure, especially being on social media. We used to make the funniest tweets and memes, post anything and everything we wanted to on Instagram and take hundreds (probably thousands) of photos with the OG dog filter on Snapchat.
When did we lose that spark and the fun of actually being online? Nowadays they’re recycling the same seven topics on Twitter (how many more $200 dollar dates conversations can we have? who would you feed first your husband or your child? I say enough is enough!), every post on Instagram is perfectly curated, you’ll never see a single hair out of place, and I can’t say much about Snapchat as it became irrelevant to me a few years ago. (So maybe that tells you something.)
Our life on the internet is moving in the same way as it would if we were on a reality show. (If you’re an avid reality tv show watcher then this’ll make sense to you.) The first few seasons of these shows are the best, everyone is broke just trying to make it. Maybe the wigs are the little messed up and a couple of hairlines are uneven but they make the most of it. The cast is their true selves because they don’t have thousands of people telling them to change on the daily. This is when the best story lines are made and the ratings go through the roof because people are having genuine human experiences that people can relate to. Eventually, once the fame kicks in the show develops into scripted nonsense, boring, repetitive and lackluster until the show is cancelled. (Sidenote: this could probably be said for a lot of scripted shows as well — looking at you GoT season 8.)
I miss authenticity. And to be authentic you have to know who you are as a person, but that’s hard to do when you’re being shown how to behave as the “perfect” individual online. Everyone is starting to look and dress the same, discussing the same topics, listening to the same music. The more freedom and connectivity the internet has given us, the more it’s confined us. (Funny how the works.) You’re barely allowed to be a human being who has ups and downs, who makes mistakes and learns from them, and God forbid you have an opinion that differs from that of the majority. (I have a lot to say about wokeness and performative activism but that’s a longer post for another day.)
Social media, as we know it, is slowly but surely coming to an end. (Or maybe I’m getting old and it’s just not for me anymore — must be time to check out retirement packages.)
