Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
In this social media era, our lives are constantly being inundated with tons of information, stories, and axioms that affect the way we think about ourselves, other people, our society, and life.
For example, while scrolling through your timeline, say Twitter or Facebook, you stumble on a student’s post which is about celebration of his admission into a university abroad, and something nudges you that it could have as well been you. It is not that you have not been trying your best to get admitted into a university abroad, the time is just yet to come.
But this news that you stumble upon, this student that you may not know from Adam and his announcement have shifted the way you see yourself, especially when you have seen multiple rejections in the past months.
Now, this student may have had his shares of failure, but he, because of time and the desire to bury them for good, refrains from writing about them. You know how typical this trend has become of our lives, how we all paint and project the best versions of ourselves to outsiders.
The roaring doubts, existential crisis, multiple rejections, feelings of inadequacies, perennial struggles, and other associated thoughts that bedevil his life are not what he may like or feel comfortably to write about when sharing his success story.
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Or it may be a post that undermines the fundamental importance of commitment, hard work, consistency, privilege, and even patience, as necessary ingredients of success. You will see someone who becomes successful one day, and without due regard to those who have helped him ascend the ladder, proclaims that he is a self-made millionaire or billionaire.
His story then becomes a preposterous kind, one that dismisses the contributory role of privilege because of his desire to appear glamorous. It bothers on the perplexity of the kinds of stories people tell on social media..
I think if we are lucky to have clinched something good, we should always recognize the place of luck. And in writing our success stories, we should be discreet enough not to write something that can undermine the efforts of others or something that can make them feel that they are not trying enough.
When your life starts making sense or it feels the whole world is at your feet, you should sit around people who are at the crossroads of their lives, people who just lost everything and starting all over again in life, or people who have been trying for years and they are not breaking through yet; and the conversations you listen to would help shape the trajectory of your life.
When you start climbing the ladder of success and winning, it is important you read less of success stories and more of failure stories. Because you are still going to fail someday. This will give you fresher, broader perspectives on life and perhaps make you consider yourself lucky.
Looking beyond social media’s depiction or portrayal of success, we must be able to sieve the chaff from the substance and investigate what parts of these stories are true, or even what parts of the stories should matter to us, that is if they should ever matter to us.
For example, somebody somewhere just bought another Ferrari or Lamborghini, so why should I care about this when I can still cruise the city in my Toyoto Corolla 2009 model? Why should anyone’s life hinge on likes, comments, and retweets as validation of their life’s success? Why do I need to keep up with the joneses?
Your friend is seemingly showing off her iPhone 13 and you think your iPhone XR is now worthless.
The most pertinent question is, how often do we have to define our worth and life based on what social media is feeding us every day?
This is why I think the greatest evil social media has ever done to young(er) folks is creating an illusion that their contemporaries or colleagues are doing way better than them (and making them invalidate their honest efforts).
In my opinion, the real people who are doing well enough do not even tell us what life throws at them or consider it needful to show off. They are quiet, reserved, committed and they keep at it—every day.
The ball is finally now in your court. You can start minding your business, like start right now, or distract yourself with some of the lies the internet feeds you.
People only tell you what they want you to know, or think you should know, particularly if that would make them feel good about their seemingly little abilities.
