social media
Social Media for modern lovers in the digital age.
"I'm the main character"
Social media can be a wonderous place. It gives us an opportunity to share our best bits with the world, and to cultivate an online presence that can be used for making ones’ wildest dreams come true, whether this be finding love, starting a business or even just learning a new tik tok dance. But has the growing intermingling of consumerist culture and social media turned us into nothing more than products to be sold? A new social media trend of describing oneself as “the main character” has revealed a rather sinister side effect of cultivating an online presence, forcing us to redefine ourselves not by who we are in real life, but rather who we are in relation to all other content online. With a growing sense of disillusionment throughout the younger generations with organized religion and its teachings, is social media and the commodification of the self, filling the void left behind in our sense of purpose?
Amelia LockhartPublished 3 years ago in HumansI HATE
I hate judgemental women. Now when I say judgemental I mean MEAN people who are so unfullfilled in their lives that they have to pick apart every post that is uploaded onto their social media page.
Jane EleanorPublished 3 years ago in HumansSelf love
The Inner Voice Somewhere in our minds, removed from the day to day, there sits a judge. They watch what we do, study how we perform, examine the effect we have on others, track our successes and failures – and then, eventually, they pass a verdict. So consequential is this judgement, it colours our entire sense of ourselves. It determines our levels of confidence and self-compassion, it lends us a sense of whether we are worthwhile beings or conversely, should not really exist. The judge is in charge of what we call our self-esteem. The verdict of the judge is more or less loving, more or less enthusiastic, but not according to any objective rule-book or statute. Two individuals can end up with wildly different levels of self-esteem even though they may have done much the same things. Certain judges simply seem more predisposed than others to lend us an essentially buoyant, warm, appreciative and generous view of ourselves. Others encourage us to be hugely critical, often disappointed and sometimes close to disgust. The origins of the voice of the inner judge is simple to trace: it is an internalisation of the voice of people who were once outside us. We absorb the tones of contempt and indifference or charity and warmth that we will have heard across our formative years. Our heads are cavernous spaces and pretty much all of us have voices echoing within them. Sometimes, a voice is positive and benign, encouraging us to run those final few yards: ‘you’re nearly there, keep going, keep going’. But more often, the inner voice is not very nice at all. It is defeatist and punitive, panic-ridden and humiliating. It doesn’t represent anything like our best insights or most mature capacities. We find ourselves saying: ‘You disgust me, things always go to shit with someone like you.’ An inner voice was always once an outer voice that we have – imperceptibly – made our own. We’ve absorbed the tone of a kind and gentle caregiver, who liked to laugh indulgently at our foibles and had endearing names for us. Or else the voice of a harassed or angry parent; the menacing threats of an elder sibling keen to put us down; the words of a schoolyard bully or a teacher who seemed impossible to please. We take in these voices because at certain key moments in the past they sounded so compelling and irresistible. The authority figures repeated their messages over and over until they got lodged in our own way of thinking – for better and for worse. Exercise: An Audit of Our Inner Voice We can catch the sound of what our inner voice is like when we prompt ourselves to finish certain sentences: When I do something stupid, I usually tell myself… When I succeed, I usually tell myself… When I’m feeling lazy, my inner voice says… When I think of what I want sexually, my inner voice says… When I get angry with someone, my inner voice says… Does the inner judge strike you as kindly or punitive? Whose outer voice became your inner voice in the context of each question? (write down their names)Why the Inner Voice Matters Our level of self-love is very consequential across our lives. It can be tempting to suppose that being hard on ourselves, though painful, is in the end quite useful. Self-flagellation can feel like a survival strategy that steers us clear of the many dangers of indulgence and complacency. But there are equal, if not greater, dangers in an ongoing lack of sympathy for our own plight. Despair, depression and suicide are not especially minor risks. Afflicted by a lack self-love, romantic relationships become almost impossible, for one of the central requirements of a capacity to accept the love of another turns out to be a confident degree of affection for ourselves, built up over the years, largely in childhood. We need a legacy of feeling that we in some basic way deserve love in order not to respond obtusely to affections granted to us by prospective adult partners. Without a decent amount of self-love, the kindness of another will always strike us as misguided or fake, even as strangely insulting, for it suggests that they haven’t even begun to understand us, so different are our relative assessments of what we happen to deserve. We end up self-destructively – though unconsciously – disappointing the intolerable, unfamiliar love that has been offered to us by someone who clearly has no clue who we are. We are highly alert to the dangers of people who have too high a regard for themselves. It is a serious put-down to suggest that someone may be ‘in love with themselves’. Self-love seems connected up with narcissism, vanity, selfishness and a blindness to the needs of others. But for the most part, our real problems lie in a very different direction: with tendencies to be deeply and unfairly hostile to ourselves, with a habit of taking exhaustive stock of our failings, of refusing to forgive ourselves for idiocies and of being suspicious of anyone strange enough to think well of us. If we saw someone else treating us the way most of us treat ourselves, we might think them despicably cruel. For the most part, it just feels more normal and therefore oddly more comfortable to be disliked or ignored. We seek out partners who will do us the favour of not thinking any better of us than we think of ourselves. The contempt isn’t necessarily pleasant, but at least it feels familiar, and in some ways right. If we are not modestly but genuinely convinced of our own lovability, receiving affection will just simply feel like being bestowed a prize for an accomplishment that we haven’t ever earned. People unfortunate enough to fall in love with self-hating types must brace themselves for the recriminations due to all false flatterers. We will know there must be something wrong with anyone who has the bad taste to get enthusiastic about someone like us. Without the sufficient ballast of self-love, we will go on to reject positive treatment across a range of areas: offers of friendship, of professional promotions and of praise will all set alarm bells ringing. We will blunder in interviews, sabotage our work opportunities and grow strange and rude around possible new friends – in attempts to bring our outer reality back into line with our inner assessments. Changing the Inner Voice It may, at this point, be tempting to say that we shouldn’t judge ourselves at all. We should simply approve and love. But we should determine that a good internal voice is rather like (and just as important as) a genuinely decent judge; someone who needs to be there to separate good from bad but who can always be merciful, fair, accurate in understanding what’s going on and interested in helping us deal with our problems. It’s not that we should stop judging ourselves, rather that we should learn to be better judges of ourselves. Part of improving how we judge ourselves involves learning – in a conscious, deliberate way – to speak to ourselves in a new and different way – which means exposing ourselves to better voices. We need to hear constructive, kindly voices often enough and around tricky enough issues that they come to feel like normal and natural responses – so that, eventually, they become our own thoughts. One approach is to identify a nice voice we knew in the past and give it more scope. Perhaps there was a kindly grandmother or aunt who was quick to see our side of things and who would offer us deft words of encouragement. If we knocked our orange juice all over the carpet, they’d remind us that accidents can happen to everyone (last week they themselves spilt a cup of coffee over the sofa). Instead of promoting a punitive, critical voice, they represent a calm, understanding way of addressing failings. We can try to focus on this kind of supportive approach and summon it on a regular basis; rather than waiting for it to pop (as it rarely does) into our heads we can deliberately nurture and train it. When things don’t go as we want, we can ask ourselves what this person would say – and then actively rehearse to ourselves the words of consolation they would most likely have offered (we’ll tend to know immediately). Traditionally, religions have attempted to help us in the task of providing us with benevolent voices. They have lent us reassuring, kindly often maternal figures whose voices they suggested we absorb into our own minds. Buddhists, for example, were introduced to the goddess Guanyin, a reassuring deity a little like the Virgin Mary who could hear us in our distress, meet us with tenderness and strengthen us to face the tasks of life. Guanyin’s implicit thesis is that being loved and worldly success are two separate things. You deserve compassion not because of the excellence of what you do, but because you exist. Achievement should not be the currency of kindness. The root of extreme stress is usually not purely the fear that one might fail. Rather it is the incendiary thought of what failure will mean: that we deserve to be ridiculed and abandoned. When the threat of that emotional catastrophe is lifted, one is better placed to get on and cope with the practical tasks before us. The other major strategy for changing the voices in our heads is to try to become an imaginary friend to ourselves. This sounds odd, initially, because we naturally imagine a friend as someone else – not as a part of our own mind. But there is value in the concept because of the extent to which we know how to treat our own friends with a sympathy and imagination we don’t apply to ourselves. If a friend is in trouble our first instinct is rarely to tell them that they are fundamentally a shithead and a failure. If a friend complains that their partner isn’t very warm to them, we don’t tell them they’re getting what they deserve. We try to reassure them that they are essentially likeable and that it’s worth investigating what might be done. In friendship, we know instinctively how to deploy strategies of wisdom and consolation that we stubbornly refuse to apply to ourselves.
Angelina VelasquezPublished 3 years ago in HumansThe Facebook Divide
I was reluctant to sign up for Facebook when it first came out so many years ago. I only had a MySpace account to play Mafia Wars with a friend and the thought of Facebook did not sound very appealing to me.
Sudie CrouchPublished 3 years ago in HumansInsta-trouble
Hi, you don’t know me, I’m a simple guy web surfing. I surf a lot on Instagram, Facebook, Reddit, and all kinds of social media pages. I’ve been single for a while now; I don’t know if it’s because I got a super low self esteem or because my standards have become super high with the years that passes. I always wondered what it would be like to be a girl. These days mostly, with all the advertising, the stunning babes everywhere. Those models that are in chains with their diets and stuff and even if I knew that its fake, still wanting to be pretty like that. Hell, I’m a guy and I’m very sensible too about that kind of stuff. When I see a fit guy, with a perfectly groomed beard, some impeccable hair, sick tattoos and a bad ass car, a big watch and of course, the hot girl that comes alongside him.
Gabriel RiopelPublished 3 years ago in HumansMy First Story
My name is Domingo Miranda. This is one of the stories that I have told many times before. YouTube has changed my life for the better and it has allowed me to become a better person and it is also improved my social skills many ways. at first I had an unbelievable stutter it was hard for me to get words out because I wasn't able to talk properly and I had trouble saying the right things.
Domingo MirandaPublished 3 years ago in Humans4 Types of Toxic Facebook Friends You Should Delete
A whopping 1.82 billion people use Facebook each day, and unfortunately, some of them are obnoxious. Dealing with rude or negative people like this can get stressful, and it may even impact your mental health. Luckily, Facebook makes it easy to remove unwanted people from your digital life with a few quick clicks. Protect your emotional well-being by deleting these 4 toxic frenemies from your friends' list.
Desperate
The craziest thing just happened to me. I honestly don't even know where the hell to begin. Let's start at the beginning of September. I was 20. I was excited about turning 21, because I'd finally be legal and won't get in trouble for the "adult indulgences" that I had been doing.
2020: The Year of Long Distance Love?
If the disaster year of 2020 has taught us anything, it's that humans as a species are relatively adaptable in the time of need. Well. Most of them anyway.
Eloise WilliamsPublished 4 years ago in Humanspink haired girl
You may be wondering "who is this person writing this story" well she's a girl, a girl with pink hair glasses and a small dog. You wonder what is it actually like having such a huge platform on social media? well I've had a few actually, they are fun but at the same time it's work, it's a lot of effort, no one comes there for you no one ever asks "how was your day?" they just want to see the picture of that singer, band, food, travel picture, whatever it is you post, they view you on this pedestal that you're not truly on. I definitely have had my fun on such accounts, so don't get me wrong when i say it's a job, a lot of work, that it's not always fun, it does have it's moments where it's stressful, but if you're in it for all the right reasons and have fun and truly love what you're doing it's not work it's worth it. I know this maybe seems like not such an interesting read, but I hope it was a bit informative that maybe it gives you a glimpse into the view of what I and other large social media influencers have gone through or are currently living, some actually have made a career of this and I truly am proud of them I know how hard they have to work because I've done it myself.
Tania PangiaPublished 4 years ago in HumansStory One
Okay. One thing that I want to make clear before I start my story, this is my opinion only. I will be changing some names as I do not want to there to be backlash on anyone who does not deserve it.
Symphony WinterPublished 4 years ago in HumansTRUMP, SOCIAL MEDIA, AND MORAL SUPERIORITY
So Trump got Covid. Depending on where you stand ideologically, that's either karma, and a punchline., or it's a somber moment to be reflected on. While pundits, former presidents on either side of the political spectrum, even his current political opponent wished Trump a safe recovery, thousands of people on Facebook, Twitter, and wherever else wished for death, mocked, laughed, made memes, or at the very least pointed out the irony.
Creativity RiskPublished 4 years ago in Humans