Social Media: The Breeding Ground for Assholes

When I was in highschool, I had a group of friends, which is a pretty typical thing when you’re in highschool. These friends were really important to me, and I spent a lot of time with them, which is also pretty typical. We spent the night at each others’ houses, studied together, did clubs outside of school together, and probably spent a little too much of our money on food together. These, too, are also pretty typical of high schoolers, regardless of the era or the friend group.

My friends also emotionally tortured each other on social media. Unfortunately, this, too, is pretty typical.

But it’s a new phenomenon. It didn’t exist in every era. Even our parents have zero tools equipped for this new issue. Instagram and Twitter weren’t really in their vocabulary, let alone Finstas and Subtweeting. Sure, their “friends” might have given them a dirty look or slipped notes about them to each other in class. However, there’s something unique in the idea that, at any point, you can open the app on your phone and subject yourself to the pictures that you’re not apart of, the comments vaguely referencing you, or the captions that blatantly reference you.

To previous generations, these comments can seem trivial. They think you’re reading too far into it, but they haven’t been playing the game like you have. They’re used to the dirty looks and slipped notes.

So, that means it’s up to us, the generation who is used to finstas, subtweeting, and the “you can follow me, but I'm too cool to follow you” psychological warfare that is happening on social media. When it comes right down to it, there are two ways to do this, and they’re really quite simple:

1. Don’t be an ass.

2. Ignore the people who feel compelled to be asses.

Ok, so maybe I low balled it by saying it’s really quite simple. Because it’s not. You think it should be, and that’s how parents are feeling when their daughter, Emily, is crying because Stephanie from school didn’t like her picture but liked Katie’s picture which was posted 20 minutes later. It sounds easy. “Don’t worry about it. It’s just some silly post. Who cares?” But we know why she cares. We've all been there.   It seems silly and overdramatic, but it isn’t. Not to Emily. Not to a lot of people on social media.

I guess it really isn’t that simple, then. So, let me break it down a little bit.

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1. Don’t be an ass.

When we were kids, we had these birthday parties, and our parents taught us that we have to give an invitation to everyone in our class. It taught us inclusivity, politeness, and how to take other people’s feelings into consideration. Well, social media is unteaching all of those lessons.

With social media, we make the conscious choice to not invite people to the party… and now they know it.

We hang out with friend groups without inviting someone, and then we post a picture that will now come across their feed. If our friend pisses us off, we get back at them by not liking their most recent post. Why? We get so mad at the idea of “trolls” who are essentially jealous strangers, but we are completely okay doing it to "friends" we care about.

Not only are we asses because we lack inclusivity and use social media as a way to “even the score,” we also accepted our own vanity and self obsessions.

I was talking to a friend one night, and she asked me what her caption should be for her Instagram post. I noticed that she had chosen three photos, two of which were of only herself and one was with her and her two friends. She had put the picture of her by herself first. I told her that I think it looks a little self indulgent to put that picture first when they were all together taking photos. She responded, “Well I am self indulgent so… at least I’ll get more likes this way.”

That was the moment I realized that maybe this whole social media thing had gone too far. If we accept that putting ourselves before our friendships is ok, and we accept that we only like pictures of attractive girls in unnatural poses, we are accepting that we are shallow. We don’t care about the real stuff but only the stuff that is prepackaged for our viewing pleasure.

So, don’t be an ass. If it will hurt someone, don’t post it. If your friend posts something, like it. If you’re doing anything on social media because of inferiority or jealousy, stop. Even though it isn’t, try to make it simple.

But being the source of problem isn’t the only issue… which leads me back to my second piece of advice:

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2. Ignore the people who feel compelled to be asses.

While it's important to not start the game, it’s also important to not enter the game when someone offers to play. Often when someone hurts us, whether it be online or offline, we tend to consume ourselves with it. We either retaliate or allow them to continue kicking us down even when it’s over. We screenshot the post. We keep visiting their page. We wait for them to do it again without saying a word.

I like to call this idea “Self Inflicted Social Media Torture.”

When I was in high school, I did this all the time, and I would be lying if I said I didn’t occasionally do it now. However, back then, it would eat away at me. I would become consumed and incessantly look at their posts, check their pages to see if anything changed, and feel my heart sink when they posted something new. They came over to my house and posted a group picture without me. They had a sleepover on my birthday in which I did not receive an invitation, and because of social media, their reward of getting likes outweighed hurting me. However, my point is not to blame them. At the end of the day, I was also the one seeking it out. I was the one who was letting it take over.

So I deleted my account. Not some of my followers, not the app. I deleted my account. Because it wasn’t making me happy. Outside of things needed to survive, we keep them in our lives because they bring us joy, but social media was not doing that for me anymore. It made me feel worse, and I knew I wasn’t confident enough in myself to ignore it.

I’m not saying you have to delete your social media. What I am saying is that it is important to evaluate the people and things you keep in your life. Evaluate whether they make you better or if they make life harder. Social media should strengthen ties, not burn them.

So, if you can’t just ignore it, find a way to remove it. I did, and I felt a lot better. Although I have recreated an account since, I took two years to learn to Iove myself a little more and get some better friends….

So maybe your changes online can lead to changes offline, too.

Good ole' Roosevelt might be from a previous generation, but I think he's on to something.