Tonight I had a striking revelation. One of those things that you already know but that you never quite grasped 100%.
My online presence has always been driven by a second mean, I have never really loved posting on social media for the sake of doing it. In fact at times I wished social media wasn’t a thing. I think about the damages it has done over the goods and I am torn.
Yes, it has its perks. Yes you can see places you have never seen before from everyone else’s photos, which makes it really easy to plan new trips and new adventures. Yes, it keeps you in contact with others, yes it created a lot of jobs and marketing is now for everyone but what about the bad? What about the overcrowding of places because of that one Insta shot that everyone wants to take? What about the comparisons that we are subjected to every day? What about the time we waste on these apps? What about the meaningless stories we post, the photos that no one really cares about and the likes that we seem to count but that mean nothing unless they buy from you?
What is the point of this over sharing? Why are we so attracted to pleasing others and be liked by people? Why do we want to be acknowledged so bad for some photos we take?

Today I was thinking about my own approach towards Instagram and Facebook and realised that I am not who I want to be online because I am forcing myself to fit into the box to gain something.
I have always wanted to work for myself and eventually that will be the goal, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be with social media. I never thought of it, perhaps because it seemed to be such a popular path that thinking I could work on something else never crossed my mind.
There are many other things that I love doing, way more than posting for the sake of pleasing others.

I like some parts of social media, and that part is the “social”. I have met several people through the app and I have stayed in contact with them, checked where they were and what they were doing because mostly, I follow interesting people.
But what else have I gained from it? I wasted a lot of time.
Sure, if I put more time into it, I will grow my following, get some attention and maybe get to work with it alone. But at what cost?
I remember two years ago when my old account got to over 10’000 followers and all I thought about were the places that I could go to just for that one photo that would look so good on Instagram. But why? For the recognition.
In my personal life I notice that whenever I talk to people, no one is really interested about what you do, unless you listen to them first. For some reason I spend a lot of time looking and other people’s behaviour, perhaps because I find interesting how we learned to communicate and fit into society with norms that are not spoken of but that we all (more or less) seem to know and understand.

So why would social media be any different? It is in fact a representation of reality, where a comment on someone else’s post might be genuine but it is mostly done to gain something for ourselves. There are of course exceptions and I am not talking about the people that post photos of flowers under bad lighting, their dog and food. They do exactly what they love, which is living their lives and posting whatever the hell they want.
I am talking about me and the thousand other people that post with hope that someone will like what we do and this is the question I ask: “Why? Why are we not like the rest, that post whatever the hell they want and not care about what others think?”.