You Are NOT Your Social Media

No one is perfect! Transcript: Can your best life really be ? My name is Nathan Wilson and this is Zoom Out –The Career Center Podcast. Have you ever heard the phrase, “Effortless Perfection?” I know I’ve heard it on campus a number of times and it drives me nuts. Why, because it’s not real, it’s not a thing, no one is perfect. No one has been perfect; no one has ever been effortlessly perfect, no one will ever be effortlessly perfect. It doesn’t exist. It’s such an absurd standard that I can’t even believe it is ever said. But you can find yourself on social media wondering if that’s the case. Because you look at everybody’s rose filtered version of their lives and start to lose track of reality. It seems like everyone’s so good, everyone’s happy but you. But that’s not real. If you don’t believe me, take it from Asena O’Neil, so she was an Instagram model out of Australia, who had hundreds of thousands of followers and was making good money doing it. Then one day she decided, I hate this. And she wanted to expose what the real life of an Instagram model looked like. So she did. She deleted a whole bunch of her photos and then recaptioned some of the existing photos to tell the real story behind all those pictures that were supposed to look natural and effortless. So the first one I’ve got here, she’s got a big smile on her face, it’s a headshot, the caption reads: “I had acne here, this is a lot of makeup. I was smiling because I thought I looked good. Happiness based on aesthetics will suffocate your potential on here Earth.” The next one is a swimsuit shot where she is looking straight down in a pose that again is supposed to look natural like someone had just taken a photo of an every day person. A caption reads: “Not real life, took over 100 in similar poses trying to make my stomach look good, would have hardly eaten that day, would have yelled at my little sister to keep taking them until I was somewhat proud of this. Yup, so totally # (hashtag) goals.” There’s another one, a model out of the UK who did kinda the same thing. She had a really good following and decided to expose what what this really was, so she put a couple photos and explained it. One of them is on the beach doing what is supposed to look like a spontaneous jump. Well, the truth is it took a half hour and over 300 pictures taken by her poor boyfriend who was roped in as the official photographer. She knew it was ridiculous and how absolutely absurd to be out there for over a half an hour trying to recreate spontaneity. The next one is her in a yoga pose reading a book with a big smile on her face. Well, the truth is she didn’t do any exercise that day at all, she has Crime and Punishment in her hand and it took her a year to read and she never smiled like that the whole while she was reading. She’s got another photo on here where she’s showing off her new workout shoes and she’s sitting in a chair in workout attire. Apparently upon capturing the photo her boyfriend exclaimed; “wow, your stomach flab has folded up to look like an eight pack” which led to a whole bunch of comments like “abs girl” and “washboard” which she says made her feel guilty. She even has one on here, a glass of green looking juice that was supposed to fit the whole clean eating thing but she said that the juice didn’t even look like that. She used filters to make it look green and healthier. I mean how ridiculous. All the effort that’s put into looking natural. It’s all fake but it can deceive us. I found a meme to a quote that is attributed to Bill Murray that says; “Social media is training us to compare our lives instead of appreciating everything we are. No wonder why everyone is always depressed.” Well, this is exactly right. OK, you are not you social media and other people are nit their social media. It is not real. So, what does this have to do with career? Well, in line

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You Are NOT Your Social Media is an episode from ZOOM OUT–Duke Career Center Podcast by Duke Career Center.

This episode is 9:46 long.

This episode was published on Sep 18, 2018.

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