I'm not even going to lie and say that I've been working on a really huge project that requires half a year (at the minimum) to materialize.
Laziness is the truth, but the stress of academia shall be my excuse. :)
To whip things here back into shape, I'll start with an editorial that I wrote for my school newspaper back in 2013. I think it's one of the only pieces I'm even remotely proud of. Writing well takes practice and A+ effort, but I'm sad to say that I've been neglecting to do both.
I just hope it's never to late to get back into the groove.
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THE RISE OF iNARCISSISM
There
are three kinds of people in this world: those who don’t take “selfies”, those
who take selfies and post them on Instagram, and those who secretly take
selfies but are ashamed to project their own narcissism and therefore hoard one-hundred-or-so
copies of their faces in their phones instead.
Guess which category I’m from? Hint:
it’s the third.
 |
| Even politicians have time for selfies... In SNL, that is. |
We have been coined by Time Magazine
as the “me me me generation”, a group of young adults who feel a sense of
entitlement in inheriting the legacies that our parents will leave someday…
Regardless if we deserve them or not. For example, researches show a
discrepancy between the test scores of many college graduates and the résumés
that they subsequently submit to potential employers. One has declined over the
years, but the other continues to stretch more and more until the line between
truth and self-promotion begins to blur.
So who should we blame for this
dangerous influx of narcissism? Certainly not ourselves, because it’s not our fault we’ve been deluded by our
mothers into thinking we’re as beautiful as Miranda Kerr. Beauty is subjective
anyway.
However, if there’s one thing that
drives the need to create better images of ourselves, then it would be the growing
influence of Internet culture and social media. Why are we so obsessed with how
many likes our Facebook photos get? How does seeing that tiny heart pulse red
in Instagram make our day like honest compliments can’t? It’s a phenomenon of
which we are responsible, yet we can’t explain why.
Facebook fools us into thinking we
have thousands of friends whom we’d talk to in real life. It gives us the power
to untag ourselves from unflattering photos as if we were never even there. It
allows us to delete comments that are shy of saying “OMG you’re so pretty
<3” and “can you not pls.” To some extent, Twitter is even worse. We see our
follower count increasing, and we can’t help but revel in having people
“following” our every move.
Here’s the ugly truth though:
oftentimes, people will respond to our Snapchats not because they find our
duckfaces cute, but because they feel an obligation to reciprocate in the form
of an equally annoying selfie. They don’t value us, but they do value the
number of times we can like the pictures they’ll post in the future.
The problem with being an
iNarcissist doesn’t lie in loving ourselves too much, but rather in obsessing
how far other people would go in showing their love for us. Rejection is bound
to arrive someday, and we’ll be challenged with the task of accepting our own
mediocrity. It’s a downward spiral from denial to depression, but the sooner we
jump off our pedestals, the less vulnerable we’ll be to inevitable
disappointment. Maybe it’s time we put those hours of finding the perfect
editing app to good use. Let’s start being productive – we can learn a new
skill, study harder or practice doing something we love. Who knows? Someday, we
might even find ourselves being promoted from iNarcissists into bona fide
internet celebrities.
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