Reality.

On a seemingly humdrum night,

I came across this video in my Subscriptions page.

I've looked up to Essena for a while now and I've agreed very much with her outlooks on things.

This video I attached is about the reality of social media. & all the things that we sometimes realise for ourselves, but we brush them off and refuse to accept it.

Because it is easier. Because it is now considered the norm.

Because we cannot imagine life without saving 5 minutes at the end of every single social event to take a selfie/group picture to post on your instagram.

Because we cannot imagine not having something to do or look at when we have time on our hands.

Because we cannot imagine not knowing what's going on in the lives of our friends or our favourite celebrities or 'goals af' models.

There are so many things that I agree with in her video, and it's just amazing how she managed to put such things into words. To realise it, to accept it, to broad over it, to speak about it and then put it out into the world.

If you noticed, there are so few Youtubers who actually do this. Who put such controversial yet honest content out to their viewers. Who say things that we many not necessarily want to hear but need to know. 

This video made me think. It made me step back and look at things from a different perspective. And I can't even explain how much brighter and clearer things are here. There were teeny tiny pockets of time, possibly even just 1 second, when I realised "why the heck am I so obsessed with how many likes I have?", "why the heck do I dress up and HAVE to take a picture to post it online?" and "why the hell do I have to think about what people like to see and not what I like to do?"

For myself, the children of my generation and perhaps the generations following, we have and will be born into the world of endless possibilities, knowledge and insight with a click of a mouse or the tap of a finger. We were born into a world of technology and social media, where we'll know what all our friends are up to in a little device in my pocket 24/7. We were born into it, so accustomed to it, that now we have absolutely and completely no freaking idea how to reverse it or break away. We have no idea what has to be done or what we can do, because in the first place, it never occurred to us.

It rarely occurred to me that I was being sucked into a black hole of comparisons, dependence and insufficiency. 

We compare ourselves with everything we see online now. Sometimes even sub-consciously. We rarely realise that when we see a person with a 'perfect body', we are literally making comparisons with ourselves, others and this specific person/body type/what we call 'objectified substance'. You like the picture because you love her abs, her long legs and her voluminous hair. You don't like the picture  because she loves health, because she helps animals, or any other reason. You don't see beyond the object in the photo. It's almost like pictures have made things so... 2-dimensional. At least, the pictures of todays generation and the majority of the pictures we see on social media. We see it and that's it. There's not much of "A picture speaks a thousand words". If it does, most of the time, all those words are just words of judgement, words of comparison, words of insecurity and words of "oh my god she's flawless she has like zero pimples." I know some of us can simply see one selfie and spend the entire day thinking about why you cannot be like her. 

We have objectified ourselves. We have identified a target and our sub-conscious minds spends every waking day striving to achieve it. Sometimes, these targets are not obtainable, but sculpted by society and the box of accepted beautifuls. We see a picture of a girl and straight away zoom into specific features. We lay out a judgement and things carry on from there - positive or negative, it could go either way. That's what I mean by 2-dimensional. Each picture that we see is immediately judged upon a scale; hundreds, millions of invisible, imaginary scales or units that we have created over time.

We depend on others. We depend on others to bring us up or sink us down. Our view of our self-worth has become dependent on others and we rely on them to determine our happiness and the course of our life. It sounds harsh and over-exaggerated, but that's really what it is.

We see a picture of what we think of as perfect. We think about ourselves; our own body, our own work, our own standards; and we make comparisons. We think about where we stand beside the specimen, and I know majority of people place themselves lower. I do. And it sucks.

And how does this affect us? We spend our whole day thinking about it. On better days, we spend at most 10 minutes brooding over it and then you don't. But little do we realise that it adds up to the pile. It adds up to our stock of our unhappiness with ourselves. It slowly accumulates to become far worse, becoming things that we can no longer escape and improve. We go on with life unhappy with ourselves, allowing these things to negatively affect the way we look at ourselves and things all around us. How far can we possibly go in life, being so unsatisfied? Very honestly, as a 15 year old in the Year 2015, I believe that my fellow counterparts and myself, have already surpassed far beyond that stage. I wouldn't say it is too late to change. I'd say that it has gotten to a dire point, and

 our obsession has become habit.

We live feeling insufficient now. We are never fully satisfied with what we have, and we rarely ever see the glass as half-full. Even if the glass was full, we'd say, "Well, the glass is too small." This case I would say is okay for certain instances, as most things are; moderation is in fact key. But in the case where we see ourselves as insufficient, we see others as insufficient... that's a different story altogether. Now this is not another one of my rants that revolve around how much we should love ourselves and respect our physical bodies more. It is about everything combined.

It has come to the point where we even want to copy and paste personalities and mannerisms. Even when we know we are not supposed to, because one cannot expect a lion to run as fast as a cheetah, no matter how similar they are. It's mind-boggling. We literally want to become a different person.

We want to workout because we want to have a nice body so that we can have more likes on our photos.

We want to eat healthy because healthy food looks good and gets a bunch of likes.

We want to get a white table because white tables are good backgrounds for pictures, and it will get a lot of likes.

We want to wear white and black because it is a trend and it says you are cool, so it will get a lot of likes.

We want to laugh a certain way, bite our nails a certain way, all in all act a different way, because it looks good, especially when other people see it.

And it is sure to get a lot of likes.

We let society's standard dictate us, our decisions and how we live our life. We don't do things with purity, with an aim to attain self-accomplishment now. We do things so that we can talk about it, post about it and get people talking about us. We want to become the subject matter of their thoughts and their conversations. We obsess with putting up a front that is most acceptable, and we forget that being exactly who we are is exactly enough. 

It is never ending. There will always be a new trend. There will always be a new 'cool', a new 'chic' and a new 'perfect'. If we let ourselves fall too far down this hole, we will not be able to climb back up.

I can only fathom what the future holds. There are so many positives yet so many negatives. There are so many paths this could take, so many in the direction of global and individual success, so many in the direction of a standstill or even of degradation. One of the things made clearer today, is that Life and this world is contradictory in some way. Like the concept of Yin & Yang, except the lines and swirls are blurred and smudged. The uncertainties of almost everything in life make up the tiny particles that blur out these lines, because there are indeed so many possibilities. But then again, it seems to me that far too many people are being spectators. Far too many are not enticed nor empowered to act and to make some things clearer. I ponder how we can change this.

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