Professor Andrew Reiner teaches the course “The Search for Intimacy in the Age of Facebook” at Towson University. He began an experiment with his students by proposing a seemingly simple challenge, “‘I want you to send a text to a friend…It has to be a text that shares your true feelings about something this friend has done or said that upset you but that you never said anything about. And you can’t spend a long time agonizing over the wording. Say what you mean and hit send.’” The students responded with incredulous looks at each other. Reiner had asked the students to confront one of their biggest fears of entering the complicated world of emotional sincerness. People seem to have an aversion to being honest with others and sharing their opinions, dreading isolation or judgement. Carefully worded text messages allow them to avoid confrontation and the risk of emotional involvement. Their apprehensiveness in sharing their opinions with friends is based on the expectation that a contradictory viewpoint would make them disliked or even jeopardize a friendship. This article heightened my awareness of this problem and made me question its roots.

Many people believe that their worth or popularity is determined by the amount of likes on a certain picture or how many retweets they get on Twitter, “In the world of Generation Y, that means conforming to the narrow lens of perceived perfection.” Not enough people question the expectation of perfection, if even online. From a psychological point of view, promoting a norm of perfection can only have negative effects, “A small but growing body of evidence suggests that excessive social media use can lead to an unhealthy fixation on how one is perceived and an obsessive competitiveness. Perhaps not surprisingly, this angst-ing can also lead to an unhealthy quest for perfection, a social perfection, which breeds an aperture-narrowing conformity.” An expectation of perfection is simply unrealistic. I believe that we should begin to teach today’s youth to be accepting of themselves and share that acceptance with others.

Students in the study expressed fears of isolation and disconnection from their friends, “This is a generation so consumed with surface connection they will do anything to appear connected, including pretending to text when alone.” Another student confesses, “‘If I don’t feel connected with others, I automatically feel alone, unpopular, less confident.’” This fear of lack of connection forces me to question the true connectivity that results from social media. Many will argue that social media has allowed for a false sense of socialization—that a thumbs-up on a picture or a comment on post can somehow substitute a face-to-face conversation.

While reading this article, I was surprised to realize that I understood the fears of the students involved in the study. Up until about the middle of sophomore year, I felt similar pressures to conform to the expectations of what to post or not post. I had every kind of social media account from Twitter to Facebook to Instagram to Tumblr. Every time I’d posted something on Twitter I tried to make it sound more interesting or relatable, and I even felt better about myself when I got “retweets” on a certain post. If posting to Instagram, I felt the need to post things I knew would appeal to my following and maintain a certain number of followers.

The anxiety I would feel when I posted something didn’t seem normal to me, and I began to realize that an obsession with social media was potentially unhealthy for me. I deleted my Twitter account, and what I posted to Instagram began to change as I posted pictures I actually liked and wanted to post. It was a slow transition, but soon I began to feel more confident with myself. I realized that what I posted online shouldn’t affect how people see me, and that I should feel free to post whatever I wanted without feelings of social anxiety or the pressures of conforming to what everyone else was posting. This perspective was liberating. I became aware of the fact that I shouldn’t care so much about what I post and more importantly about what others thought. I began to work towards becoming a better person because of this. I wanted to be more sincere and open with people, and find friends who respected my opinions and feelings. I wanted to distance myself from the idea that social media could dictate anything about me at all. I wanted to live without the fear of what people might say or think and without the expectations or restrictions of society.