Selfie Is A Human Tendency Not Obsession

Click click click! Clicking pictures of everything around us or with everything around us seems like an obsession. Wherever we are, we turn to our front cameras and click pictures of ourselves. We never seem to get fed up of ourselves. Selfies are in vogue; specially among the people of this generation. Technology provides different apps to enhance our pictures.

Snapchat filters serve us with variations for our selfies. People love that feeling when they get likes and comments, when they are praised for their pics and why should not they? But does it hint at narcissism? First, let’s see what is narcissism and from where it supposedly came into origin?

The word ‘narcissism’ means excessive love of oneself. Narcissism, the word originates from the myth of Narcissus. According to Greek mythology, Narcissus was a hunter from Thespiae in Boeotia who had fixation on oneself after he saw his reflection in water. He could not love anyone else and because his love was for himself, there was no reciprocation of love. In the end Narcissus remains lonely and turns into the narcissus flower. To sum up; narcissism is “all about me” attitude. It seems like this attitude is being inherited by humans from generation to generation. Of course, smart phones were not born with human civilization but they adopted different modes.

Talking about the early men, they used to paint on the cave walls. Traces of it are still found, where paintings portray how they used to lead life. Later when artists started to paint on the canvas, people preferred to treasure their portraits and paid the artists. We have so many paintings revealing this tendency of human nature to make itself eternal in some or the other way.

Then came the camera; a revolutionary invention. Camera aided people to capture different moments of life. People had to remain still so that their portraits could be made but now there stills could be taken with a camera so easily. We all have photo albums filled with pictures of our families and ourselves. We have beautiful moments preserved forever.

With the advent of smart phones (that gives the facility of camera as well) people can click pictures anytime and anywhere. Though some people see it as an obsession; if smart phones were introduced earlier, people would have reacted the same way. Some people might claim that people were not so much obsessed as they were not clicking pictures every now and then. I would give the credit to accessibility as cameras did not produce pictures immediately. Lest we forget, they did not give the option to delete unwanted pictures for a long time. The obsession with one’s own self that can be observed in almost everybody cannot be denied. At the same time, we also cannot blame the generation stating that it is their creation.