What’s Perfect Anyway?

How Social Media Perpetuates A Life Of Comparison & Ostentation

Living in a technology-based society, coupled with remote working and e-learning, has made it nearly impossible for us to detach from our devices. Since the quarantine restrictions made earlier in the year because of COVID-19, the Washington Post reports an average of 34 hours per week spent on Apple devices by its users, via surveys conducted using the company’s ‘weekly screen time report’.

That's equivalent to the time spent at work by a full-time employee. There’s no shocker that the content consumed over such long periods of time becomes influential in our day-to-day lives, ultimately affecting the way we view ourselves, our relationships, and our lives in general. Spending this many hours on social media has had many proven clinical links to depression, body dysmorphia, and other mental triggers.

To be honest, people show off all of the time, and arguably, that's what social media is for. Check your social media feed and you’ll probably see people ‘virtue signaling’ in one of three key areas:

• ‘Reaching’ — people displaying wealth, education or success
• ‘Related’ — people celebrating marriage, children or monogamy
• ‘Responsibility’ — people flaunting their health, altruism and free will

The posts we engage with have also been proven to have algorithms so that we see more posts similar to the ones we like, comment, and share. The algorithms even go as far as calculating how long you spend on a post, so reading long captions triggers the algorithm to show you more posts that are similar.

“Okay, all of that sounds good, but how does this affect me?”

Well, according to clinicians at McLean Hospital, a Harvard Medical School Affiliate, Social Media has the same effects as the slots in the casinos. “When the outcome is unpredictable, the behavior is more likely to repeat,” Sperling says. “Think of a slot machine: if game players knew they never were going to get money by playing the game, then they never would play. The idea of a potential future reward keeps the machines in use. The same goes for social media sites. One does not know how many likes a picture will get, who will ‘like’ the picture, and when the picture will receive likes. The unknown outcome and the possibility of a desired outcome can keep users engaged with the sites.”

Often emulating the content that's posted by popular users, hoping to get the same type of adoration and engagement they do, drives up the number of anxiety, and depression, McLean Hospital researchers concluded.

Parents feel that their teenage daughters have become more obsessed over their bodies to be perfect. Spouses have complained about the lack of intimacy and quality time, and their wives suffering from body dysmorphia.

This reigns to be true as USA Today reported in 2019 that according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, more than 20,000 people had the BBL procedure by board-certified surgeons in 2017, rising steadily from 8,500 in 2012. As of the end of 2019, pasticsurgery.org reported over 120,000 BBL and Tummy Tuck/Lipo procedures done in the U.S alone, performed on women between 22–38 years old.

There have been numerous researches and clinical trials done that link social media to behaviors and moods. This has built a need for acceptance and can trigger narcissism in already addictive personalities because of the instant gratification of “likes”. There is also a counter effect to this, receiving backlash or ridicule of something posted to a user's account, causing self-esteem issues.

Whether it's wanting to go above and beyond during the holiday season to have gift-giving wars on Facebook, documenting every step of your relationship for aspiring “couple goals” comments, wanting to have a certain body, look, or style, or anything else that wouldn’t matter if the apps on our devices didn't display the lives of our peers in real-time, it makes it harder for some to enjoy things “in the moment”.

Feeling like there is a constant competition happening when really it’s users competing with facades, filters, and skewed views, has served as a disservice. The only thing that matters is accomplishing the things you want to accomplish for you, not the next person’s dream, not their aspirations.

Social media can be a great tool to build a community of like-minded individuals, network and gain opportunities, reconnect with friends and distant relatives. Using the apps for its initial purpose would be great, and would definitely reduce weekly screen time hours because really, is looking at constant updates of Aunt Janice’s new score on candy crush worth 34 hours of your week?