Why Social Media is Ruining Your Life

endorsement from others made them more likely to offer validation to others.

While we like to preach the idea that you can “be anything you want to be” in our real lives, the truth is that there is a social stigma attached to self-invention as if it’s a con.

Tellingly, many of the adverse effects of social media use appear to be inherently gendered. Women make up the majority of audiences across all the visual platforms, notably Instagram and Pinterest,

In the 1920s, parenting experts counselled to never hug or kiss your children, and in the 1950s pregnant women were encouraged to smoke. So, you know, there’s a precedence for at least a margin of error.

Each and every fault can be erased and replaced with new and increasingly homogenous upgrades to make you feel like the very best version of yourself

It’s so easy to think, ‘she’s glowing’, or ‘she obviously got pregnant on her first try’. We can very quickly persuade ourselves that she never struggled.

The hypocrisy is stunning – all sorts of sexually charged images of girls in bikinis revealing their derrieres and hoicked-up cleavages are fine, but a woman feeding her child in the most nonsexual setting possible is somehow unacceptable.

six in ten girls now say they feel prettier online than they do offline.

Creating this kind of soulless content doesn’t just make you feel bad – it can completely destroy your self-esteem and sense of who you are.”

I am much less productive and it means my work day bleeds over into my free time.