Pretty People Overload?

How ironic that the inspiration for this actually came from a Tiktok I saw from one of my favorite creators, @sotce. (Imo, she is one of the only actually beneficial accounts on that godforsaken app as she talks about mindfulness and Buddhist teachings in a digestible way to modern teens) Before social media existed - the bane of our existence - the prettiest person you would see was some girl in your hometown, or on the train to your job, or the silver screen of Hollywood. But with social media platforms like Instagram, and now Tiktok, who give the illusion of casual posting - when in reality it’s not that casual at all - we‘re constantly barraged with images and videos of perfect 10/10. At the risk of sounding overly sentimental, we have become numb to the beauty around us, making the pretty girl in your hometown seem plain next to the girl you just watched on Tiktok whose name you don’t know/remember, because we’re used to it. So what good is a million followers if the fame is fleeting? We can’t all be the next Charli D’Amelio. This phenomenon doesn’t only apply to looks, although we are the generation of narcissists. As a collective, we just don’t find pleasure in the simple things, the things that surround us, anymore. The old saying “the grass is greener on the other side” has never been truer, because let's be honest, I’d rather be partying on a yacht in Valencia rather than sitting here, typing this, contained by the lifeless concrete walls that are my high school. Now I’m not going to lie and tell you that I have no social media presence, which you’d know immediately wasn’t true, because who in their right mind would hide looks like this? Kidding, but I miss the days when I was younger and the prettiest person I ever saw was a girl I saw walking around with her friends in the mall. Every day I wake up thankful that I wasn’t a sticky Ipad kid, partly because of how my parents were, and partly because life didn’t revolve around social technology when I was younger. This obsession, addiction really, fosters not only jealousy, but when we’re overly judgmental of ourselves, we pass that same judgment onto other people as a way to cope or justify the problems we have with our image, and vice versa. So the next time you begin to compare yourself to someone else, which really in this age of technology is inevitable, I encourage you to think about how you probably weren’t really supposed to ‘meet’ (para-social relationships are whole other issue) this person in the first place, and how you probably would not have been bothered with their presence otherwise.