Social media - A reality check (Read: rant)

A popular and pervasive debate, penned as personal prose.

Social media.

The proverbial window to the world, perched compactly in your palm. The chronicle, that diligently and permanently etches all your milestones in the cloud. The perennial theatre, running reel after reel of your proudest wins, happiest whims, wittiest spins, and indulgent sins.

These are what it wants to be, at the outset.

And it is all of that, no two thoughts about it.

But turns out that none of us are only what we want to be. Not even social media. It bears a shadow self too, which, in fact, is more insidious than most of ours.

Peel the casting of the exuberant faces and assertive words displayed, and you'll find the deepest fears and insecurities pulling the levers.

You'll realise how these manipulation-fuelled mirages have made us expert Matryoshka dolls, painstakingly building layers over layers of our near-perfect selves living near-ideal lives, in the sole bid to earn more and more social validation currency.

Likes. Comments. Hearts. Views. Clicks. Shares. We reduce the entirety and enormity of our lives to mere metrics on a dashboard.

What makes it worse though, is that you're mostly only aware of your doll in the making, and not of the others. Throw in a handful of insecurities with some well-chilled imposter syndrome and garnish with a dash of anxiety - you've got yourself the perfect self-loathing cocktail that's sure to keep you inebriated for as long as you wish.

You're a Matryoshka doll that’s under the influence, running on an invisible hamster wheel - with an elusive promised land that only keeps moving further away, the harder you try. Because, unlike the offline world, the gods here don't play by the rules; they're not here to make you win, they're here to win.

Okay, Sadhana. We get it. It's all dark and depressing. Isn't this the part where you unveil the solution to make all of this go away?

I'm afraid, that's all I have to share about this, at least right now. And strangely enough, I know that this is all I needed to share.

To become conscious of the cracks beneath the plaster. To acknowledge the ugly part of the truth. To put it in writing, so we all could soak in the essence, see it for what it is, and recalibrate ourselves.

That's half the battle won already, isn't it?

Images by Peggy und Marco Lachmann-Anke and Hannah Alkadi.