Hi everyone!

So I needed to write an article about social media in a school magazine and I decided to connect anxiety and loneliness with Instagram. It might be a harsh topic at first but I am guiding through everyone how I see the connection of these two so it is more digestable for everyone. Please keep in mind that my target audience was the age between 12 and 18 so that's why I am using examples more relatable for them.

Social media and specifically Instagram is undeniably taking over the world. 72% of teenagers use Instagram and 6 adults out of 10 have an account. As a result, more than 100 million photos and videos are posted on this platform daily. Not only people but businesses recognized the potential of this platform so it is understandable that they would like to maximalize their profit by using every possible way of advertising. Instagram is one of them. There are more than 25 million businesses present on Instagram. Many of them collaborate with your favourite influencers in order to sell as many products as possible. In some cases the influencer doesn’t care about the product, they just promote it for the money. Of course not everything is black and white, a lot of influencer likes and uses the product they are promoting.

But why am I telling this now? Because I believe it is important to know these things in order to fully understand what I’m about to say in the followings. A lot of people nowadays try to search the cause of the increasing number of people suffering from anxiety and loneliness. It is so strange to see that the more connected we are online, the more lonely and disconnected we seem in real life. Why is that? Well, such as many others, sometimes I am also wondering about it and I believe one of the main reasons is Instagram. Now don’t get me wrong, I like to search photos on it but these days I try to only check out the pictures I am really curious about and not scrolling down endlessly, checking everyone’s “perfect life” jealously. I realized I feel more down after seeing tons of beautiful pictures about beautiful people living their best lives with #blessed. I thought in myself

“What am I doing with my life? There are these awesome people living their life in a way that I also want to but I am just here. I am not doing enough. I am not enough”

I think this is the right moment for me to mention, these thoughts are working on an unconscious level as well, so most of the time you don’t even notice that you are comparing yourself to others. Luckily I caught myself having these thoughts and I noticed that I felt horrible. My mood was ruined. But why? I know now. It is important to keep in mind that these pictures are the highlights of people’s lives. They are not having only these moments in their lives. They struggle too. They have problems too but they will not share it on Instagram because nobody wants to see the struggle. Do you? When you have your own problems at school, at home, at work or anywhere, you go to Instagram to make you feel better, not to see more struggle and problem. Obviously you wouldn’t follow those accounts either. So in order to get followers, people only post about the best moments of their day, creating a fake image for themselves including only awesome moments. These are the accounts most people follow. Do you get now where I’m heading with this? This is a never-ending squirrel wheel. In a result of these, some people even take this to a whole new level and create themselves a double life: in their Instagram account everything is perfect, but in reality they can not avoid facing their problems.

So what does everything I said mean to you? Well, whether you noticed it or not, these influencers create insecurity in yourself. You might not notice it but you unconsciously comparing yourself to others every time you are seeing someone who is “better” than you in your own opinion. It is different for everyone. If you are not confident about your body, every time you see someone who has a “nicer” body, you compare yourself to them. If you are insecure around people, every time you see someone with a lot of people around having fun, you compare yourself to them. If you are not doing so great at school and you see someone getting the best grades, you compare yourself to them. For every insecurity you have, you can find thousands of pictures that make you compare yourself to others. Of course you start to doubt yourself. It is human nature. However, what is really important to keep in mind is the thing that I have mentioned previously but it is so significant, I am going to say it again.

Nobody is reading a book and drinking coffee at the same time in the bed surrounding with flowers and lights. Are you kidding me? It is impossible to do so. Have you ever tried it? Try it and you will see. It is just pleasing to the eye. And people follow accounts where they can see nice things because they are escaping there from the reality. Once again, it is a squirrel wheel.

So by now, it is pretty clear why people get lonely and anxious a lot more than before. I think the best advice that I can give right now is to delete Instagram immediately. No, I was just kidding. Obviously people will not start to delete Instagram because as I was saying before, things are not just black and white. There are a lot of good thing on Instagram and hundreds of opportunities for everyone. You can actually make a living these days by only doing Instagram but it is really important to run an account that gives value to people. There is nothing wrong with making nice pictures, videos and building a business on them as long as you are giving value to people.

I think Instagram and social media in general is a topic that I could go on and on all day but for now I will just finish with saying

Klementina