Social media: What I'll Say

People are not hashtags. They aren’t tools for validation or content for our feeds. But we’ve built an entire culture where even our closest relationships are reduced to likes, comments, and shares.

Social media is complicated. It's this strange world where connection and isolation coexist, where you can have thousands of people following your every post and still feel completely alone. It’s an illusion, really, a reflection of what we want to show, not what’s truly there.

I remember someone in 2019 when I joined WhatsApp to have more access to communicating with my family and it was more like a private space unlike noe when it's now becoming a mainstream means of communication. Even then, I used social media sparingly. I spent most of my time learning languages ( I learnt six), working on my deen and tech. I wrote articles and journalled a lot about my goals and aspirations. I taught people, connected more with my family, played, and there was me I loved so much.

Following my involvement, things changed, a lot. I won't deny the fact that it provides a lot of dopamine rush excitement. I wouldn't even say I wasn't addicted at a point addicted and it does provide an avenue for indulgence. When I'm bored, I pick up my phone and I'm on a platform, doom scrolling, and I use it as a means to escape crucial tasks that I dread doing. Lol.

I am someone who can read four books in a day but sadly, I no longer read as much as I want because social media has fractured my attention span with its nature of short, high dopamine content, while reading requires deepened focus and doesn't give similar sharp dopamine spikes as social media.

We carefully curate our lives, edit out the mess, the doubts, the quiet moments when nothing’s happening. And yet, for all its filters, social media still manages to expose something raw. The need for validation. The constant hunger for attention. The desire to be seen, to matter.

Photo by Ijaz Rafi on Unsplash

But isn’t it ironic? We post, we share, we comment, all in the hope that someone—anyone—will notice. And sometimes they do, but the recognition doesn’t fill the emptiness. It never does. We scroll through lives that seem more perfect than our own, more interesting, more vibrant, and then we wonder why our own lives don’t measure up.

Social media is a mirror, but it’s one that reflects back a distorted version of reality. A version where everyone is winning, except for us.

What I'll say is this: social media is both a gift and a curse. It brings us closer to people we might never meet, opens doors to ideas and experiences we’d otherwise miss.

But it also builds walls, turning our lives into a competition, our worth into a number. Likes, followers, shares—they don’t define us, though it sometimes feels like they do.

Maybe it’s about finding balance. Using social media for connection, not comparison. For inspiration, not insecurity. It’s a tool, not a measure of our value. And maybe, just maybe, we need to spend less time scrolling through other people’s lives and more time living our own.

We’ve traded depth for brevity, true connection for virtual exchanges. It’s strange how we can “share” so much of ourselves online, yet feel more disconnected than ever. Everyone’s living for the likes, the comments, the acknowledgment from people who barely know them. And somewhere along the way, we’ve forgotten what it means to truly know someone, to engage with them without the filter, without the constant pressure to perform.

We claim to love people, yet we spread their truths as if they’re nothing but stories for our entertainment, stripping them of dignity for likes and shares. We’ll post sweet words about someone we call q friend, putting on a show for the world to see, but behind the screens, we’ve let resentment and judgment simmer in silence.

How many times have we smiled and typed those flattering words, only to speak ill of them when the screen goes dark? How often do we pretend to be supporters, only to silently tear them down when we think no one’s watching?

We’re living in a time where love has become conditional, a performance for the digital stage. It’s easier to write a few words, make a post, click ‘like’, and call it love. But real love doesn’t stop at a screenshot or a status update. It isn’t just about the grand gestures for an audience; it’s in the quiet moments, the real conversations, and the actions when no one’s looking.

We’ve turned affection into a façade, trading genuine connection for the approval of strangers. And in doing so, we’ve lost the ability to see each other, truly see each other. What we claim to love, we sometimes mock behind closed doors.

People are not hashtags. They aren’t tools for validation or content for our feeds. But we’ve built an entire culture where even our closest relationships are reduced to likes, comments, and shares. We’ve made it too easy to hide behind a screen and say one thing while doing another. But the truth is louder than any post we put out.

And deep down, we all know the difference between what we say online and how we act in our dms. It’s time we stop the lies we tell ourselves about our connections only leave us emptier.

While social media was once hailed as a tool for connection, it has, in reality, become a silent killer of growth. It’s not just a distraction; it’s a distortion of everything we thought we knew about ourselves and the world around us. We’ve become so obsessed with projecting a perfect image that we’ve lost sight of the raw, uncomfortable process of personal development. Instead of growing through our struggles, we mask them behind filters and curated posts, pretending that everything’s fine while the real work—the tough, messy, transformative work—remains buried.

We’ve turned validation into a commodity. The more likes we get, the more we believe we matter, and the more we believe that who we are is dependent on the approval of others. It’s dangerous. It’s insidious. Social media feeds our insecurity, making us constantly compare our behind-the-scenes to someone else’s highlight reel. It creates a cycle of self-doubt, where our worth is tied to numbers, to external metrics, rather than the quiet, steady progress we make within ourselves.

In the process, we forget the importance of introspection. We lose the ability to sit in silence, to reflect, to struggle without an audience. The pressure to always be “on,” to always be sharing, to always be "doing" is choking our ability to grow at our own pace. We’ve traded authentic growth for empty achievements. The real work of personal development isn’t flashy; it’s about learning to sit with discomfort, to fail, to start over, and to grow in ways that don’t get shared or praised. But social media doesn’t care about that. It doesn’t care about the mess or the quiet battles. It only cares about the illusion of success, the surface-level victories.

And the worst part is that we’ve normalized this. We’ve allowed ourselves to be consumed by an environment that demands constant performance. We’ve become addicted to the dopamine hits that come from notifications, losing sight of the fact that true growth—real, meaningful development—requires patience, solitude, and an honest look at who we are without the need for applause. We’re too busy looking for external validation to even recognize when we’ve outgrown the version of ourselves we were yesterday. Social media has turned growth into a spectacle, and in the process, we’ve forgotten that the most important growth happens in silence, in the unseen moments where we choose to evolve, regardless of who’s watching.

Espero que encontremos la alegría que merecemos, permanentemente.