Social Media is not Reality and Scrolling isn’t a Form of Exercise

October 14 // à la Zoe Williams

Muffy checking out a vacationing English bulldog’s Instagram account

It’s official, scrolling is destined to become the verb of the decade. Scrolling is an action that we know like the back of our hand and at times seems to come more naturally than, well, almost anything else. In fact, so much so that when I decided to take a 72 hour “Social Media Detox” I found myself habitually going to Instagram to open the app an innumerable (and quite concerning) amount of times each day. But why did I feel such a compulsive need to do so?

Scrolling is so easy to come by that it is quite literally at our fingertips 24/7. You can inundate yourself as many hours of the day as your heart desires with images that are aesthetically pleasing and create a façade of perfection. Perfect bodies, perfect couples and perfect lives. If there wasn’t a definitively perfect version of something before, social media has manifested it. We might say to ourselves that the action of scrolling is mindless, but our brain is registering these images and using them as a tool for comparison in our daily lives. But how and why do we constantly compare ourselves when what we are seeing is not in the slightest bit comparable in nature?

Muffy agrees comparison is no fun, especially when she’s stuck at home

We’ve always wanted to keep up with the Jones, but social media changed the game when the Jones’ lives were available for us to view like our favorite reality show. Well, the bits and pieces they wanted us to keep up with at least. How do we separate ourselves and our accomplishments from those of others that are continually plastered in front of our faces like billboards that scream “anything you can do I can do better, oh and I’ll do it in an expensive pair of designer heels”?

I have always struggled with searching for perfection, continually telling myself it doesn’t exist and pressing repeat.  Social media makes this search seem within reach yet always fleeting and escaping our grasp. Some may think comparison is good, competitive in nature, but I find in the age of social media that it can become unbearable at times. In the inevitable moments when we are down, social media taunts us with others’ perfectly filtered lives beautifully glaring brightly at us from the palm of our hand.  

Quite often we forget that a picture is a fleeting moment. Somehow when it’s posted to social media it seems factual and concrete. It allows us to mislead ourselves and write a story about someone else’s life without being privy to any real information or facts. Seems counterintuitive, doesn’t it? We all need a reminder, myself included, social media is a form of entertainment and while it is based in someone’s sense of reality it is not our own.

Let’s turn the lens back on ourselves and filter it with honesty rather than Valencia. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but it never truly tells the full story.