From the looks of things, the one thing that determines how ‘cool’ you are on social media is how many likes you get for your posts and how many followers you have – of which you are not following back.
The #WCW/#MCM trend is surprisingly still a thing. The acronyms stand for ‘Woman Crush Wednesday/Man Crush Monday’ but the longer and deeper meaning of it is ‘a person that is appealing to the eye who we probably don’t really know much about but praising them because they look absolutely beautiful’. It seems as though one of the vital things on social media is a person’s appearance – we celebrate the visually beautiful people. But then again, it’s almost kinda understandable why this is so – one simply cannot take a picture of their personality.
You get those that post pictures of completely clothed women with a long deep caption about what a wonderful soul they are and close it off with ‘#WCW’… That is a picture that will not send people sliding into you DM for contact details, nor will they flood your notification tab with ‘likes’ and the flame emoticon. So then, it is wrong to dive into conclusions and say that we upload pictures of our #WCW/#MCMs for ‘likes’? We all love beautiful people, you know we will most definitely double tap that!
What you post about your life also affects the number of ‘likes’ that you will receive. For instance, if you party in posh venues with South African personalities and check-in at an expensive hotel afterwards, you are worthy of all thy ‘likes’. However, when you post a picture of yourself herding cows or something of that sort, no matter how much you actually love it, your followers will scroll right past. Trust.
People are conscious of how to score ‘likes’. Making fun of people by creating memes about what just happened to them is one of the ways one can gain followers and ‘likes’. The more tuned you are on media, the more memes you create, the more followers and likes you attract and the cooler you get. Yes, you get all of that. No, no text message from your bank account informing you how much you have earned from dedicating all your time, energy and data reading up on people. None of that, but you got new followers therefore you are happy.
Honoring someone who had just ran 2 000kms (if it’s even possible) for a good cause will not score that many ‘likes’ nor followers as it would have if you just posted up a meme. People love to laugh, not at their lives but at someone else’s. It helps them sleep at night knowing that someone has figuratively and sometimes literally fallen to ground level. It helps them sleep at night because that makes them realize that they are not the only ones on ground level anymore. So why should they be expected to ‘like’ something of good cause that someone has done?
Detach yourself from the habit of comparing your life to those whom have 25k followers yet only following 91 people. You know nothing about them. All we see are their lifestyles, not so many are confident or proud enough to post about how they generate income to afford their lifestyle. For all you know, they are living off their parent’s hard work.
*inserts inexistent side-eye emoji* *clicks ‘unfollow’ button*
“The problem is that we compare our lives with people’s online content and by the looks of things, no one on social media has a horrible life simply because people post what they want us to see and not how things really are.”
Seemingly, nobody is motivated to live their lives just as it is. Embrace your life, realize that you can mold it into whatever that will best suit you. Who will like and ‘like’ it for what is it is beyond your control if you choose to be genuine. Forget about what people have penchant for with regards to social media posts. .
Bear in mind that everything you post is contributing to your digital album of all things that would make you reminisce on your favorite days later when your are aging. You do not want to look back to your posts 50 years later and shake your head hopelessly when you remember how most of the things you did were forced. Post what you like, not what the mass will ‘like’. No one ever defined or limited what a social-media-worthy picture is. Do not live your life off ‘likes’. Do youf
2 Comments
Wise and edifying words. Thanks!
You just correctly written everything about what likes are and defined as.