Imagine yourself at a concert.  It cost a lot of money to get where you are, but it’s worth it.  The band you love most in the world is performing mere feet away from you, and you can see every unfiltered feature on every one of their faces… until they’re blocked by the cell phone of a girl taking a picture of herself.  As you struggle to regain your view, you realize that this girl will not put her phone down.  In fact, she seems more focused on heightening her cheekbones than the people onstage.  You never knew those harmless selfies could be so irritating.  But are they really so harmless?  Mostly, yes, but consider this: the popular selfie trend actually has the ability to open the door for gratuitous insults and lowered self-esteem, remove a person from real-life experiences, and damage relationships with the people around them.

Selfies are among, if not the, most popular images on social media; unfortunately, because they’re pictures of people’s faces, they’re also the most affected by comments.  Gorgeous, huggable, ugly, fat - the duty of judging rests upon the shoulders of commenters.   Positive things make us feel good about ourselves, but insults can make a person’s self-image plummet.  Even when the insults, and sometimes compliments, aren’t true, it isn’t uncommon for the owner of the face in question to take it all to heart.   People are often “socialized toward seeing themselves as lovable and worthwhile only if others value them… selfie culture is a way for this tendency to go into overdrive,” says psychologist Jill Weber.  Of course, there are plenty of people who post to show off a haircut or prove they’ve been somewhere awesome , and couldn’t care less what the comments say.  On the other hand, some post solely for the comments.  They “post things to get attention, positive feedback, and social validation… [their] insecurities make them vulnerable and too… [reliant] on the response of others” (P.B. Rutledge, Ph.D).  Selfies are a way for such insecure people to cultivate the bad habit they should be curbing. 

Do you remember that concert you were attending a paragraph ago?  While it’s possible you’ve never actually been in that situation, it’s hardly unrealistic.  People often get so wrapped up in taking pictures of their life and letting online followers know what they’re up to that they neglect whatever it is they’re doing!  In fact, sometimes the obsession is taken so far as to become a selfie addiction - yes, that’s a real thing.  19 year old Danny Bowman of Great Britain even attempted suicide because he couldn’t capture the perfect image of his face.  Of course, that’s an amazingly extreme case, and milder versions are much more likely to occur, but it goes to show how far that kind of tunnel vision goes.  If, when you ought to be enjoying what you’re doing, you “imagine everything as a selfie” or “have a hard time making it through the day without taking a selfie” (Rutledge), you might even be an addict yourself.  The truth is, in the words of Dr. Pamela Rutledge, “what’s abnormal for selfies is, as with most things, a lack of balance”.  It isn’t wrong for someone to take a selfie at a concert, but there’s a point where all the pictures and sharing become almost narcissistic.  Sometimes the world of selfies, filters, and comments can totally consume a person - but it shouldn’t!  If we pay for a concert, don’t we want to actually watch?  If we visit the Great Wall of China, isn’t the experience more important than the image? 

Now we’ve arrived at the “damaging relationships” bit.  The claim seems a little ridiculous, doesn’t it?  How could selfies damage a relationship?  The answer lies in how others see you.  Some people regard selfies as indicators of a superficial person who’s too focused on their physical appearance.  While this isn’t necessarily true of all selfie-takers, it isn’t hard to imagine such a thought going through the mind of a friend who’s feed is constantly filled with your face.  When asked by magazine Teen Vogue, a 17-year-old girl from Massachusetts said, “My friends and I joke about people who have selfies as cell phone backgrounds.  It seems like they have nothing more important in their lives other than how they look.”  This Massachusetts girl and her friends aren’t alone in their opinion.  Even if you don’t think selfies are in any way related to an over-appreciation of one’s looks, an obsession with them has to take away from the time one spends with their family and friends.  Snapping photos and posing all the way through a visit to your friend’s house is bound to strain the relationship.  But that isn’t the worst case scenario.  “Even more damaging, 25% of all selfie-takers have taken a sexy-selfie at some time” (“Selfie Boom”).  That means there’s a 1 in 4 chance that the selfie-girl at that concert has taken a photo of herself  nude or partially nude.  The same goes for your social media-loving brother or your best friend who always sends you her selfies.  Isn’t that a scary thought?  Sexy-selfies can easily destroy a person’s future and reputation, especially now that colleges and jobs can check their history with such things.

No one should walk away from this thinking selfies are devil’s spawn, because they really aren’t.  Selfies, unlike magazines and advertisements, celebrate average people.  And even the best of us want to preserve the experience of attending a concert or walking on the Great Wall.  It’s just that the dark side of selfies is very dark indeed.  While we shouldn’t shun selfies, we can’t let our world turn into one that consists of asocial people so focused on sharing that they end up having nothing to share.  Let’s take a step back before the selfie-takers of the world become obsessed.  Let’s not forget the relationships we have offline and spare ourselves the pain of comment-caused stress.  Let’s remember to live in the moment, not the photo.