The other week, my friends and I were sitting around in my bedroom, all on our phones. We weren’t listening to music, but occasionally pointing things out to each other and giggling. I love my friends, and we’re very rarely like this, but after a while I got very bored of just sitting there staring at a screen – to be honest, I think everyone did. So after a while of laughing over how we looked like teenage stereotypes that our parents always mocked us for being, we all put our phones away for a bit and listened to music and just talked. And we laughed and I felt so, so happy. And then I felt a slight urge to reach over and take a photo – much to my annoyance.
We live in a world where we seem to feel the need to validate our experiences by documenting them. We throw phrases around like “if you didn’t snapchat it, did it even happen?”, and God forbid we look bad in a single Instagram photo!
I do it, my mum does it, my friends do it, celebrities do it – but at what point do we need to draw the line? At what point does uploading photos and getting likes and comments become more satisfying than actually experiencing what is going on around us?
With social media becoming more and more relevant to everyday life, when does it stop? When do we need to withdraw ourself?
