Social media is a cunning, manipulative canvas, splattered with ideas and images that influence you in more ways than you’d like to admit. It yields the power to define trends, to push your childhood favourite style out of fashion and to conjure new fashions that you coerce yourself to be obsessed with even though you can’t seem to wrap your head around what all the hype is for. Complying to trends has become the ultimate do or die.

Thank the artists (aka influencers) for painting glamorous and flamboyant paintings of what an ideal life should be like. What is an ‘ideal’ life, you ask? It’s everything that they think it is. Where your biggest problem is being capaciously capricious about what colour sneakers would be your best bet to perfect that day’s ‘OOTD’ (Outfit of the Day).

Image Credit: Good Faces from Unsplash

Don’t get me wrong though, I’m not trying to belittle the work of influencers in any way. To each their own, and I’m no one to judge. What I find problematic though, is how we sniff after every step that an influencer makes online, desperately trying to emulate the aesthetic that they tantalize us with.

Right from the filters they use to the poses they strike, everything they portray has become a symbol of relevance and resonance. A gospel truth. We’ve all, you and I included, become patients of what I like to call the ‘influen-za’, a flu so rampant and seemingly impossible to eradicate, which (paradoxically) keeps worsening as we continually use masks behind which hide our true selves.

The Rise of the Retro

One good that is becoming increasingly inelastic these days is a digital camera. All of us suddenly want photographs with a chic, retro, 90s sitcom ‘vibe’, just because we see our favourite influencers inundating their feeds with these. The digicam fever is so rife that having a repertoire of warm-toned, sepia-hued photograph with goofy poses is seen as a badge of honour, a stamp of approval that hollers ‘I am in this generation, I see this trend and I conform to it’.

When I first reached university, I saw everyone around me in such a frenzy to get their ‘How I Met Your Mother’ inspired pictures as soon as possible, squeezing themselves in large groups just to extract 'Instagram-worthy' digicam photographs. In fact, the feverishly few who did own a digicam were the first ones to be swimming in oceans of ‘popular’ groups, just because they had something that could give everyone else their ‘that’ picture, which they’d hungrily post later in the night.

Image Credit: Pedram Farjam from Unsplash

The race to get perfect digicam pictures overwhelmed me in a way that I found myself at a party one night, outside campus, just because I was told that a few people were bringing their digicams and that the place was a cult-classic for the people at my university, known for its humble yet happening ambience. Full disclaimer: I’m not someone who’s big on partying. Sweaty people sopping in puke piling on each other in highly cramped and contaminated areas is not my thing. But I still went, having been heavily indoctrinated by social media, thinking that digicam pictures were the ‘in’ thing and that I’d be missing out on a lot if I didn’t have at least one retro picture with me sticking my tongue out and holding in my hands a red plastic cup (isn’t that how all digicam pictures we enviously scroll through end up looking?).

I ended up having a really horrible time. The party place is a ten-minute walk away from campus but it felt like I’d been walking on those roads for much longer.

In the phagocytic darkness of the night, I huddled along with a big group of girls, palpitating in fear as creepy men in large vans passed by us, slowing down and casting disgusting glances. This wretched walk itself had pierced a wound through my gut, and without wanting for that wound to deepen or worsen, I reached the party, realized quickly that no digicam pictures and social media validation were worth my physical discomfort, immediately called up a guy friend to come and pick me up, and walked back to campus with him, feeling a lot safer with him next to me (this newfound safety made me so furious and helpless at the same time).

In hindsight, I’m so proud of myself for not having pushed myself to succumb. I’m glad I left the party without the coveted digicam pictures because had I stayed, I would have continued to cheat on myself, pretending to have fun even when I felt jittery, restless and petrified.

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Pretense, Politics and Pressure

Apart from trends like the digicam that we are being convinced to hanker after, social media is also instilling in us a dangerous sense of superiority and animosity. It’s shocking how we’ve all suddenly stopped captioning our stories. Even if someone wishes us on our birthday, we don’t express gratitude like we used to.

We’ve stopped writing personalized thank-you notes while reposting their stories for us. Now, we just repost for the sake of it – there are politics involved as people use reposting, without associating the stories to their individualities, as superfluous acts of establishing self-importance. This makes me wonder if this aversion to text and emojis in our social media stems from constantly putting the content of influencers and celebrities, who might repost a hundred stories without words of thanks, on a pedestal? Just how most of them have made lower-case font to be the only acceptable way of writing on social media. Capital letters are considered sacrilegious.

Then there’s the battlefield of spam accounts, where letting people in and kicking them out is a pretentious and painful game altogether. You’re constantly being judged based on how many people you invite to your smaller, more intimate account. If the number of people on your spam is one too many, you’re a wannabe. If it’s hardly any, you’re pathetic and lonely.

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My friends always grumble about how I disappear for days on social media: I prefer to keep it deleted most of the time because I’ve seen all its brainwashing furtively seep inside me in the most detrimental and self-reprimanding ways.

I think social media is increasingly resembling one boiling, brooding infestation of cheating, as we are lying not only to the world around us, but most concerningly and potently, to ourselves. Perhaps this realization is the only mask that can save us from the conniving and all-consuming ‘influen-za’.