What Happened To Authenticity?

I think it's a sign of the times. We chat more than we talk, we take pictures more than we look around, and we watch others more than we do ourselves. I'm looking for the reason we care more about likes and retweets than finding connections when we look up for our screens.

My question is, what happened to authenticity?

There's something concerning about the amount of time we spend obsessing over our image. Whether that's our image we present to our friends in real life, our peers online, and the one we show strangers, why are we always looking at that as the bottom line of our identities? I find it sad that aspects of life nowadays are mostly based around what we can do to document it for the internet. Every picture nowadays is planned, posed, filtered, edited, and carefully posted with the goal of generating the most attention possible. We market ourselves every day with how we update online.

Social comparison is nothing new. Even without our phones, we would be questioning our appearances and choices looking at the person next to us. But our technology does nothing but accelerate our ability to do so. In the short minute you're scrolling your Instagram feed, you're decoding and processing so many messages from the people, places, interests, and experiences that you wouldn't otherwise be reaching. What you see can make you feel envious, inferior, and unhappy. And yet you look anyway. The reason we "stalk" other peoples' accounts and scroll back to see their pictures all the way to 2015 is because we can't help but feed it to ourselves. The information is right there in front of us and all you have to do is make sure you're not double-tapping the screen to be exposed.

Beyond needing to see other peoples' lives, we use social media to fuel our ability to present ourselves however we want. And we do it by pouring our time into the content we release for the world to see. Because between your grandma, your ex, and people you don't even know, there's a certain way you need to appear as. Your posts can't be anything less than that. I don't find much of the value in spending all of this time on how we look online. I don't exclude myself from this narrative; I definitely get wrapped up in the same habits and thoughts revolving around my social media. But I think there's something deeper there. I don't think this stops at our image online because I think it translates to how we live in the real world as well.

Sometimes I find it difficult to keep conversation with others, and I'd like to think it's nothing that I'm saying that's deterring our communication, but there always seems to be something easier to engage in on our screens. We have no trouble sitting in silence at the dinner table if everyone is glued to their phone, and we will most likely only start conversation over what we can show the person next to us on our device.

I think authenticity fades when we turn our experiences into proof that we have exciting lives and nothing more than pictures. Formal events are no longer opportunities to connect with people, they're photoshoots. Going on vacation is no longer time to relax, it's time to work on your feed. Eventually life is no longer about memories, it's about documentation. Like the saying goes, "pics or it didn't happen".

I challenge you to see beyond someone's social media account. Ignore their VSCO filters and their clever captions, and reach them as a person. Maybe 2018 can be the year we can get back to being authentically ourselves.

xo Kate