People who think that they’re important:
There are people just like you or me that think they are more significant than the average person, when truthfully these people are just self obsessed gits. An example is the sort of person who will sit on the bus or train, in the seat meant for people that are less able to stand, these people are either elderly, pregnant or injured. This person is uploading a selfie with today’s breakfast, while a 90 year old grandma, who recently broke her hip is having to stand with crutches after the replacement, all because this person is so self-infatuated. The old lady has to endure the one and a half hour journey to visit the grave of her recently deceased partner. Mr self obsessed also doesn’t notice that people actually don’t care what he has for breakfast, lunch or dinner any day of the week or even the year, he’s still smiling smugly at his accomplishment of letting the world know about the breakfast that he had this morning. The worst thing about the whole scenario is the fact that the selfie with breakfast was the first update, of many to come.
There’s another person sitting just a couple of seats away from him, a girl about twenty years of age, maybe younger, possibly older. In this week alone she has taken 240 selfies and it’s only Thursday morning. You can see that she has make-up plastered on her face, like the paint on a 1960’s Mercedes Benz. This make-up of course is applied extremely thickly as she doesn’t want to receive any nasty comments from any of the one billion followers she has on Instagram, otherwise she would have to seek admiration on a new profile or platform, to feel good about herself, her body and the fact she spends most of her time awake trying to take selfies.
I should mention the fact that this is happening because she’s under pressure from people to look like celebrities when we should accept that we are all unique in some way, and that should be appreciated. It’s honestly kind of stupid that men and women try to be something they’re not in order to be happy about themselves, it just results in low self esteem and unhappiness. This happens way too much on social media, just because people want to be accepted by the two billion other people on the social networking sites, including their friends.
Narcissism and being egotistical isn’t something that is new to society but has been around since human society has become more crowded. People say that social media has vastly increased this narcissistic behaviour because you can access more of it on the myriad of different platforms, some of which are: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and snapchat. These sites are the perfect outlet for people release their egotism into the wild, so it in a way encourages this sort of behaviour. This does not mean that the amount of people who are narcissistic has risen a ridiculous amount in the last 30-40 years though. Social networking/ media is not a bad thing, it’s just this sort of behaviour that people show on it and how they use it to do this.
Instead of being narcissistic people should be more reserved about their own life that they lead. It doesn’t mean that you can’t share things with friends, you should just reduce the amount of things that you post. On top of this you should make sure that the people that you have as a friend or follower actually are people that you get on well with, instead of just using some random person that you’re using to further the amount of followers or friends in order to look good to people. If these people do genuinely care, then when you upload a picture of something that you just bought they will think it is cool and the comments will be truthful, not fake. Try not to divert a conversation so it focuses on you as its most important part, add to it instead, listen to what is being said instead of ignoring it and getting bored. I’m not saying that you should never talk about yourself and focus things on you because it’s impossible not to be slightly narcissistic.
This is a quote from fight club: “We buy things we don’t need with money we don’t have to impress people we don’t like.” This is true with a lot of people on social media as most followers don’t actually know you and most likely don’t like or care about you. They used you in order to get more followers and returned the favour. Another way in which this is true is when people buy clothes or technology to be accepted by a group of people so they can join it. These things are usually just expensive and the whole thing is just a status that doesn’t matter and isn’t worth it.
React!