It’s a Thursday night, I’m stuck at home trying to finish a paper that’s due at midnight, and instead of being productive, I open up snapchat and start looking through stories. I click on one, and then another, and soon enough I have watched every single story in my recent updates and have come to the conclusion that everyone – and I mean everyone – is having more fun than I am. The more I tap, the worse I feel. I can’t help but compare my current situation to the stories that I see, and I know that if there were a contest of who was having the best night, I would be in last place. I’m at home, in my pajamas, while the rest of the world is out living.
It’s silly, really – the fact that an app can make me feel bad. So what if I didn’t go out like everyone else? So what if I didn’t update my story with embarrassing photos that will definitely need to be deleted in the morning? It was one night, and I shouldn’t care what everyone else was doing and posting, but I do.
Thanks to snapchat, and social media in general, we have become overly involved with other people’s lives. We can see what they do at all times of the day, and I think it’s easy to start comparing yourself to others based on what you see in an eight second video posted to someone’s story. We get so wrapped up in the lives of others that we stop enjoying our own.
But we shouldn’t. And I no longer want to. So I’m taking a step back from Snapchat. We are not breaking up, just seeing other people for a while. Because I’m tired of constantly checking how other people are spending their time, and I’m tired of making myself feel bad for not doing exactly what everyone else is doing on a Thursday night. Life is short, and I want to start living it for me – not for how it will look on my Snapchat.
Image courtesy of Forbes.