From Behind The Filters

It’s been the daily routine for many us to update our life, on the social media, in one way or other. Most of us may skip our gym schedule, but scrolling down the endless virtual world of social media cannot be compromised. We filter happy moments of our life and make it less worthy than it actually is. And what we actually lose behind those filters on the posted picture is our real personality.

Social media has surely helped us to connect fast and easy, but it has taken away who we really are. We see people posting their happy moments on their Instagram accounts, but their actual lives stay as the stories behind the curtains. Their efforts behind the success, their scars behind those beauties of photos are lost in the filters. Even when, we post our pictures we try being that person who we want to be. In the commencement of Northeastern University, Tara Westover said “We humans have always struggled with two identities,” she added, “with who we are when we are with ourselves and who we are when we are with others. But now we have a third identity, this third self: the virtual avatar we create and share with the world”. She believes that we should love who we are, because that has bought us to the position we actually are, in our life.

Being unreal on social media causes some big issues in our lives. It may lead to a loss of self-respect, self-love, and liveliness. Due to this, people are not able to find real joy out of their happy moments. Also, people usually see life as a filtered event. It has been seen that people get jealous of their acquaintance due to their posts on social media. We also find social media fanatics around us, who post each and every moment in their life, open to the world.

It is the fact that in today’s technological era we cannot imagine our life without social media, but in order to gain virtual happiness, we should not lose real us. We should not forget the beauty of nature, in the course of capturing it through the filters. We should accept the flaws we have and work upon that. Let’s keep ourselves filter less in front of the world and most importantly in front of ourselves. It’s well said by Zadie Smith, “Like most lies that we tell, the worst danger isn’t that others will believe it, but that we will come to believe it ourselves”.

-Nikhil Bhad