What you see is not what you get. Applied to others, it’s an adage that we all have been quite familiar with; now, it applies to ourselves. What we build up as an image — on our Facebook, Instagram, Twitter accounts — is actually a carefully and consciously crafted appearance of ourselves that we want the world to believe.
Nothing bad so far. Who doesn’t aspire to be the best version of him/herself? But when we spend almost 90 per cent of our day surfing social media profiles, somewhere down the line we are bound to realise we are almost leading bi-polar lives – perfect virtual ones and flawed real ones. Says digital expert Chetan Deshpande, “To be successful today, you often have to be your own brand ambassador and have a network of followers on social media. Hence, our digital footprints are becoming part of our personality profile.”
THE ‘MARKETABLE’ YOU
Student Tanmaye Chadha, 18, is tired of everyone broadcasting every detail of their daily lives on social media. “We are presenting a hyper-idealistic version of ourselves – an image that the real us deep down finds hard to live up to. The
natural consequence of this is that we put excessive pressure on ourselves to live up to that virtual image, and in the process become anxious, aggressive and then fatigued.”
Elias Aboujaoude, author of Virtually You: The Dangerous Powers of the E-Personality, talks of the same malaise. She says, “We are living in an era where humans are putting forth these edited and inflated versions of their lives, this ‘idealised self,’ and then they are, quite literally, falling in love with themselves. This person, this you-but-not-you, seems sexier, healthier, and cooler, because they’re made up of only the good memories.”
A lot like a Bollywood or Hollywood superstar’s larger- than-life persona before the days of social media; where what we believed was what they projected through a carefullycrafted PR machinery working overtime on overselling the good and completely omitting even a single flaw. Except that these days, we are
all superstars in our own right – and with each social media validation, our own image becomes larger than life in our own minds.
WE SEE WHAT OTHERS SEE…
Life coach Ekta Sibal says by reshaping our image into one that we aspire to be, we are selfperpetuating a vicious cycle of validation. “We start to believe our own illusions because we see other people believing in them too.” It’s like they say: repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth.
Or, does it?
THE THIN RED LINE
Do you spend a lot of time planning to use social media?
Do you feel the urge to use social media more and more?
Do you use social media to forget about personal problems?
Do you become restless or troubled if you are unable to use social media?
SELF-PRESENTATION BIAS IS BASIC HUMAN NATURE
“We present ourselves in a more positive manner than is the case in real life, which in psychology is called the self-presentation bias. We do that both offline and online – the problem is that in an online environment you can enrich that information with emoticons, hashtags, pictures, videos etc. —Mischa Coster, psychologist
How much of your life are you willing to market?
Unfortunately, people are realising at the cost of their own sanity that believing a lie doesn’t make it the truth, that ‘likes’ do not automatically convert into ‘success’ or happiness or the truth.
EVERYTHING IS ILLUMINATED
One of the reasons this problem has multiplied in our age is the fact that we are a restless generation, and we expect all our emotions to be validated instantly – almost as instantly as we get fast food or a WhatsApp message. So, every ‘like’, retweet, becomes our instant ego booster, making us believe in our inflated image.
But with every negative interaction, we also fall apart and feel persecuted. Media technologist Deanna Zandt, also the author of Share This! How You Will Change the World With Social Networking, says this happens because the part of our brain that thinks logically or knows how to balance emotions has taken a backseat because in our own minds everything about ourselves is illuminated. “So, any online interaction that upsets us makes us feel like we are being chased by a cheetah – it actually feels like you are physically under attack.”
We have come to a point where everyone must decide what’s more important – our imagined lives or our sanity? Psychologist Gitanjali Sharma says, “For sanity to prevail, you need to have a solid grip on who you really are, and know how much to believe in your own virtual image.”
TO BRIDGE THE GAP BETWEEN VIRTUAL AND REAL YOU...
Stay away from social apps as much as possible
Turn off notifications on social apps on your phone
Make it difficult for yourself to log in to your social media accounts on office computers
Customise your feeds to keep away from unnecessary image boosters, like useless quizzes that make you feel like a grammar/maths/history expert
Curb your curiosity about the lives of others: humans are naturally curious, and social media feeds the habit
Limit your sharing Don’t feed your self-esteem with ‘likes’
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