Throughout the years social media has grown through all ages. It has grown through apps like Snapchat, Instagram, and TikTok.

Social media has become a part of our everyday routines from it being the first thing we do when we wake up in the morning to being the last thing that “helps” us go to sleep at night –even as little as waking up in the middle of the night and checking just to see our feeds. Teenagers have grown to become addicted to social media.

Teenagers can become addicted to things very easily, especially because when these are the years where the brain is known to develop the most. Growing up, I am the youngest of three, so I have always been around social media. I have seen the way social media has affected someone close to me in my high school years and how they wanted to have the “perfect” image.

Social media was once a place where people could communicate with each other and stay updated with friends. Now, social media has taken a dramatic change to become a place where kids or teenagers have an unrealistic idea of how we should look, dress, and act. This sets an unrealistic view because we never see fully into the lives of influencers.

These platforms cause teenagers to grow low self-esteem, and think they need to change everything about themselves to fit the ideal standards that influencers make. This can lead to growing rates of depression and anxiety.

There is the mindset of needing to look the best all the time or even the anxious feeling of thinking people are looking and constantly judging.

For example, on Instagram, people only put out what they want everyone to see. People have normalized editing pictures to make themselves look better and or a certain way. This has set social media standards for it to become normal to edit pictures to make yourself look different.

These ideas are far from the truth and the real idea of the world. Social media only shows what influencers or people put out there, not the real-life world and the realistic challenges of growing up. People never know everything that someone is going through behind the curtains; we only know what we are shown.

Social media is supposed to be a place where people can share common interests or even communicate with each other. However, now social media has become a place where younger kids are afraid to share their interests because of the fear of being judged.

Social media has created spaces where people are now scared to not be good enough to fit the standards that social media has created. We have the opportunity to change social media for the better and for the next generation.