What’s the first thing that you see when you see yourself in front of the mirror? asks Hina Fatima Khan

It’s a tough task to ignore those perfectly shaped bodies, even when we know that looks can be deceiving, even in 2022, even when all this talk of body dysmorphia and social media seems so 2018. Even after Lancet released a paper almost five years ago on the subject. Even when there are entire alternate platforms like BeReal dedicated to living life filter free and even when it’s GenZ and their ironic posting. Even then. 

Why can we not stop obsessing over faux beauty parameters and how they override our overall behaviour? What is the internet doing to us and why are we so compulsively and mindlessly addicted to it? 

The aggressive need for dopamine hits via likes or comments on posts, use of filters, our pseudo-woke tendencies to look even fairer than we naturally are or several other reasons are all rather transparent once we enter the virtual world.

According to recent studies, social media can severely impact not only your self esteem but also the way you view the world. No TED talks or contour tutorials can come to our rescue during days of anxiety, when we slump dejectedly, spiraling into self loathing. 

In a 2021 study by the City University of London, researchers tried unravelling the negative effects of beauty filters on our mental health. The participants included 175 young women and nonbinary people, aged between 18–30, the majority being 20 and 21.

The stark figures show that 90 per cent of the young women in the study said they use beauty filters. Interestingly, the cohorts also used these filters to reshape their jaw, nose, lips look or even eyes. 

Starting from ENIAC, the world’s first programmable general-purpose electronic digital computer, to social media, there came a great many eras and milestones. Yet no other era has been as powerfully toxic to humans as the current one. We are living in an era of toxicity, the age that filled young minds with self-doubt while leaving them in an unhealthily envious position. It doesn’t even wait until puberty, kids as old as seven are going through serious mental health problems. Once rare, it has now become the usual course to feel anxious, jittery, depressed for no reason at all. 

From Six Degrees (the first social networking site), till now, there has been a 360-degree change in our lives. Today, our lives revolve around unhealthy envy, rivalries, body image issues, eating disorders and brain fog. These are some of the issues that are engulfing us as we devour social media. Apparently, our ‘Internet personalities’ have become more important than our original personalities. The persona on social media looks enviably happier, contented and full of gratitude as against the real picture. This diametrically opposite picture is creating a mental milieu that is hosting unhealthy practices like ‘overthinking’, filtering out the truth eventually leading to ‘anxiety’ and ‘depression’.

Comparison is the death of joy, yet that’s what we do online most days. Is it so revolutionary to think that social media can instead be used as a celebration of your own personhood, authentically, without the frills of validation? 

I think not.