I was recently talking with one of my co-workers, who was sharing concerns about her daughter. Her 13-year-old had recently taken a beautiful photo of herself and posted it to Facebook. A little while later the young girl took it down, as she explained it had not gotten enough “likes.”
My heart ached in that moment for this teen, whose self-confidence and self-esteem seem to be affected by her popularity in the world of social media. I started to wonder: “What if Facebook determined my self-esteem?” And the more that I thought about it, the more that I realized that maybe sometimes it already does.
There have been countless times where I’ve been disappointed that a post I thought would be well liked, only got a few thumbs ups. Where I’ve questioned myself after a picture that I thought would receive countless comments did not receive even one. Where I blocked others from my News Feed because it was hurting me to see how frequently other people gushed over their perfectly filtered photos and eloquently written statuses.
While no one may want to admit that Facebook and other social media outlets affects self-worth, I feel confident that I can’t be the only one. I can’t be the only one who sometimes finds herself quantifying her value. And I can’t be the only one who is exhausted from counting the likes to help fill up her self-esteem.
I wonder now what would happen to those of us who have thrived on the instant affirmation of social media, if it were all gone tomorrow. If Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and all the other outlets just disappeared. I wonder if we would feel disappointment in the inability to publicize and receive validation for both our most shining moments, and our most mundane. I wonder if we would desperately grasp for some other way to be built up by the world, or if we would have no choice but to find confidence from within, knowing that God alone can determine our value. I wonder if we would stop basing our worth on a tally, and base it on the fact that the God of the universe designed us exactly as He intended, for a specific purpose, thus giving our lives more worth than we could ever understand.
Thankfully, no matter how long social media remains, I know that I can choose today to find rest in the knowledge that God couldn’t care less about how popular I am on Facebook. I know that He created me for a purpose, one that will last long after all of the social media outlets have run their course and faded away. And it’s because of this knowledge that I can be certain that what is remembered about my life won’t be a montage of my most popular Facebook posts. Instead, people will remember what I did for others, and how I lived my life for God. And if that’s what will be remembered, then that’s where my focus should lie.
My hope is that as the weight and importance that our culture places on social media grows, I can break free of the mentality that it somehow affects my worth. That I can use social media to share pieces of who I am and what I find important, never stopping to wonder how popular that might make me. That I can press forward with confidence knowing that God created me to freely be who I am, no matter how many “likes” I receive. And that ultimately I would learn to find my value in Him, and in Him alone.
Photo (Flickr CC) by whiteafrican.
