The Tech Epidemic
It's been awhile. I didn't even know that you could take this long of a break from blogging. Honestly, I've been so caught up in my current situation, I've lost touch with the fact that I want to write. I find it almost comical, how I probably have time to write and be creative, but I choose not to. Instead, I have fallen slave to the plague of technology, constantly scrolling down my Instagram feed and looking for new Snapchats. Throughout elementary school, I was almost completely carefree. I had everything under control, I had time to read, I was the closest to stress-free I had ever been, and my life was almost blissful. Without the unrealistic expectations that I've obtained from social media, I was happy with myself and the way I looked in most aspects.
A few years ago, I started middle school. In sixth grade, I started feeling the need to fit in even more, so I resorted to starting some social media accounts. The first was Google Plus. It helped me gain new information, and it was really fun to look at every once in awhile. The next thing I got into was Instagram. This was the, by far, one of the worst mistakes I've made in my life. My young, impressionable mind was bombarded with pictures of people I was jealous of. It appeared that they had all the money, all the fame, all the happiness, the perfect body, the perfect life, and they ate the perfect food. The worst part of this all, is the fact that 99% wasn't real but, of course, my little impressionable mind didn't get that. I think it took about half a year of being a part of this social media revolution and being surrounded by new people at school, for me to start feeling so self-conscious that I physically felt sick. There was a certain switch that was pulled, that got me to feel bad about my body, the way I ate, my school life, my home life, the way my nose looked, how I have acne, and what clothes I wore. Without knowing it, I had just stepped on the escalator of social media. At the end of the grade, I had obtained a Facebook account, a Twitter, a Tumblr page, an Instagram page, and a Google Plus account. In seventh grade, I had a very rough year. Not because of school, but because of issues at home. So, during that summer, I took the liberty of deleting all of my social accounts. The summer was fun, and I lost a lot of my anxiety. Then eighth grade came and, in order to communicate, I started up my social media accounts again. Over the past few months, I've been bombarded with this overexposure to information, and I care about my appearance more than ever. It's almost hard to function, with all of the depression and anxiety I get from social media.
Over the past year, I've noticed that it hasn't been only me that's been affected by this social media epidemic. I've met seventh graders, that feel comfortable sending nudes over snapchat, just because they think it goes away after a few seconds. Instead, it backfired on them, someone screenshotted them, and now they're being bullied for being a "whore" and a "slut". There are endless movies out there about people being cyberbullied or committing suicide because they thought they weren't perfect enough, and now that the social media fire has spread across elementary schools it's happening to even younger people. It's almost sickening that there's so little being done. The people that should be helping don't know how to approach the problem, and usually end up ignoring it (as they didn't have the problem when they were kids). So it's almost up to my generation (the generation that's currently in highschool or just starting college). We need to take action, and we need to take it now.
So how? How can we stop this ever-growing movement? There's no absolute way to take action, there's no way to just put up a wall to stop it, but there are ways to deal with it. Take a break. So this year, my goal is to connect to the world by disconnecting from social media.
