How Social-media Influencers are playing with our Self-Esteem!

2064th BLOG POST

The boom of unlimited internet offers from Jio and lockdown gave popularity to many Youtubers. Whenever any individual gets an instant fame or money, they tend to believe that they have won the race of life and hence, they have answer for almost everything. Sometimes, when I go through any Youtuber’s video thumbnails, I feel like laughing seeing them talk on several different topics which actually needs an expert’s comments rather than a generalist. But because they have audience right from the age of 12+ following their content, they know that fooling or in the technical terms – Influencing them is easy. They don’t even feel ashamed when couple of Users comment and let them know about the several aspects they have wrongly represented or not considered at all while speaking on the critical topic. They’ll end up creating another video calling those genuine netizens as trollers. As I said, you can declare Earth as flat if you have followers on Internet because you will always have followers believing and supporting you in almost anything you say.

 

The biggest issue that I have understood after watching significant amount of such videos and podcasts that rather than providing you any kind of motivation or inspiration, it can only make you feel incomplete, unhappy and loser. Yes! I am not saying that all videos/podcasts are useless but almost 90% of them can’t provide you practical inputs because people speaking in front of the camera are talking about every thing from their perspective. For e.g., people have shared immense amount of content related to morning routine as well as evening and night routine in few cases. What I have understood from the same is that one will have to keep 3-4 hours in morning to give it to themselves for all sorts of activities right from cleaning your system to brushing teeth to exercising, meditating, journaling, listening to classical music, planning your day, writing gratitude, enjoying sunrise in nature blah blah blah!

 

Let me break this down for you taking my own example- as I said, everyone talks from their own perspective. I have to get up at 6:30 AM for just getting through the essential activities to get ready to leave for my office around 7:45 AM to catch the most famous- Mumbai local train. After being at office for the whole day where a person can’t have Me-time as you are being paid to work for minimum 9 hours. These influencers also suggest us to take afternoon nap. How to tell them that we aren’t at a privileged position like them or those start-up founders who have liberty to have an afternoon session all for themselves. We have to rush to reach cafeteria, catch a table, warm our food in microwave after standing up in queue even there, eat fast because there are other employees watching at you to vacant the table so that they can begin their lunch too. After that, we get 5-10 minutes of time to have a short walk or gossiping session with our team members and get back to desk for completing our tasks or else, wait late in the evening until all the tasks aren’t completed.

 

By the time, we reach home – it’s already 8:30 or 9 PM and in most scenarios even later than this up to 11 PM. We freshen up, drink water/beverage, have dinner and its already time to sleep as your body has given up after such a day where your spine has been straight for almost 16 hours and more since you woke up. How am I or anyone expected to then work on their skin care routine by applying serum on face, under-eye cream for avoiding dark circles, castor oil on hair for its growth etc. Not only this, we are expected to have dinner 3 hours before sleeping and even sleep by 9-10 PM. Dude, we are reaching home between 8 to 11 PM. Are you asking us to even carry dinner with us and eat it at 7 PM before leaving office – the stale food without even having provision of warming it up? And how am I supposed to sleep by 9-10 PM when I am reaching home exactly then?

 

These influencers will never be able to respond to such queries because they haven’t lived this life and they aren’t aware about it at all. In fact, the videos should suggest what we can do while traveling by public transport. How we can read books or work on our passion if it can be executed on laptop etc. They should guide regarding working upon journaling or even meditating while traveling. Obviously, without sitting in the proper meditation posture but by just crossing our leg to give us the feel as meditation is more about focusing on our mind than how we are sitting. Hence, anyone with a corporate life can never feel happy if we keep watching such videos and feel that this is what needs our attention than realizing that we are already doing great with our life by earning bread and butter for our family and future.

 

The reason why many of us are unhealthy is because we genuinely don’t have time for ourselves. But we will always be ridiculed and laughed upon in such videos calling us procrastinators or lazy. I am seeing students influenced by them and rather than studying and researching, they are spending most of their times either in watching these impractical content-creators or journaling, meditating and following skin-care routines. Because of the Instagram and Snapchat, they feel that they need to always look beautiful, handsome and young so that their pictures always look enough cool for them to fetch views, downloads, likes and proposals. Thankfully, the social media came into the picture only after I was done achieving all that I wanted from my academic life. Even though it was there when I entered college but I always utilized it to promote my blog and book-reading culture.

 

Please beware of such content on Internet and focus upon what you can do in already planned day to create special moments in your life which can take you ahead. We have weekends and we can make most of it if we have a tough weekdays routine as I mentioned above. Don’t ever feel that you aren’t special and inspirational just because you are not able to do stuffs these guys boast of doing in their videos. We don’t even know if they are actually doing this or just selling their content by letting us feel how perfect they are. Most of the content of their videos are inspired because a sponsor wants them to talk on a specific topic – either about online courses or a cosmetic product or a mutual fund investing platform etc. Hence, they try to be master of all so that they can get all sorts of sponsors and keep on earning through brand collaborations. We even end up buying those products thinking that it will help us like it helps our online idols. I hope I have made myself clear enough and don’t need to rant anymore. Haha..

 

Thanks!

 

WRITING BUDDHA