INSECURITY AND VALIDATION SEEKING | JournalismColloquium

INSECURITY AND VALIDATION SEEKING,

DESTRUCTION TO HUMAN PSYCHOLOGY

Insecurity is deemed as a step closer to the cliff of destruction in human psychology.

Source: John Holcroft

By Aiman Khalida

It is 2021 and we are still in the middle of a pandemic. A pandemic that forces us to lock and quarantine ourselves, in order to curb the risk of spreading of COVID-19.

A pandemic that puts a halt to most of the outdoor activities that involves mass gatherings and forces us to work from home. And a cause to the implementation of online and distance learning (ODL) for the students.

Supposedly, being at home should ensure comfort and joy to most, but now that the workload and classes are brought to home, it has defeated the true purpose of ‘home sweet home’.

Long hours in front of laptops, doing work and attend classes virtually whilst the need to do chores at the same time, can be overwhelming sometimes. Some of us desperately need an escape from all work affairs hence we turn to social media as a form of entertainment.

Facebook, Twitter, Snapchats, Tiktok and many other social media—well, you name it—have successfully tied us down to our seats, eyes fixed on the screen and continuously scrolling through our social media leaving us completely immersed in it.

Well, after all, we needed it—the social escapism from daily boredom, pressure and even loneliness.

However, we need to remain cautious on what we are constantly looking at and how it would slowly impact us.

Seeing people upload their outfits of the day, their ideal body, their aesthetic bedrooms or anything that implies perfection in their life and their best moment in life sometimes makes us feel like we are missing out in our lives.

It has left most of us pondering if we are doing things right in our life and why we do not have what they have.

The downside of social media above was due to the highlight reel, which is one of the social media stressors. An award-winning digital marketer, Bailey Parnell, enlightened that highlight reels happened when one portrays the highlights of their lives on social media.

“We struggle with insecurity because we compare our behind-the-scenes with everyone else’s highlight reel,” Parnell quoted Pastor Steven Furtick in her TedTalk, ‘Is Social Media Hurting Your Mental Health?’.

It seems almost as if we are in the middle of a competition of portraying perfection and our dream life, except that this competition does not end, and sadly, does not offer a grand prize either.

It often slips our minds that these things are not 100 percent real. Before it was uploaded, countless shots were taken, and long hours of editing were consumed just to acquire that perfect photo.

It is NOT raw and is filtered, yet many feel insecure seeing the ‘perfect’ photo.

In a Netflix documentary entitled The Social Dilemma, it showed how social media has slowly negatively affected our psychology.

Seeing many girls with fair skin, long wavy hair and a curvy body get complimented leaves girls with distinctive body feature questioning their self-worth and self-acceptant.

Teenagers especially, listen too much on what others say,

and start to downgrade their self-worth.

Source: Netflix/ The Social Dilemma

Society has grown to think that the people with features stated above are beautiful, hence creating such a foolish and unrealistic beauty standard. In addition, it leads to people in the society wanting to change their body features.

In the documentary directed by Jeff Orlowski, former Google design ethicist, Tristan Harris, exposed that this is when the recommended ‘filter’ starts to kick in and play its role.

When one feels too insecure about themselves and does not think they are beautiful; they would tap on filters that look good on them. These filters filtered out their flaws and assist them in sharpening their jaws and cover their pores.

When filters were first introduced, everyone loved them. Well, of course they do as within a tap on the screen, it gives you an instant beauty look that most have been dreaming about.

The society had set our minds that when we upload a certain picture, it must achieve a specific number of likes. When things went south, we started to question ourselves on what went wrong. Nonetheless, it showed that we, indeed crave for people’s validation.

Harris, who is also the co-founder of Centre for Human Technologies enlightens that social media does not only control where the users spend their attention to but in fact, social media starts to dig deeper down into the stem of the brain and take over kids’ sense of self-worth and identity.

Kids and teenagers especially, who are too young to be on social media, became sensitive on how they are perceived by the public.

“We curate our lives around this perceived sense of perfection because we get rewarded with short term signals like thumbs up and likes. We conflate that with value and truth,” says the Former VP of Growth on Facebook, Chamath Palihapitiya in the documentary.

The decrement of self-acceptant and self-worth has led to the increment of mental health issues among the social media users, especially among teenagers.

A study has shown that self-image failure perspective can explain the link between narcissism and the usage of social media and smartphone of adolescents.

Narcissistic individuals often attempt to manipulate their social environment by seeking positive feedback and enact self-presentations that broadcast their greatness.

The same study suggests that the heightened reward sensitivity explains narcissistic youths’ excessive or inappropriate engagement with social media.

In fact, when youth experience ego threat or to be precise, social rejection, the link between narcissism, attention-seeking and social media outcomes became stronger.

These needs for affirmation from others, might also foster greater social media dependency that manifests as anxiety or other signs of behavioral or interpersonal difficulties such as neglect of other interests, and interpersonal conflict.

According to a survey by National Health and Morbidity Survey (NHMS) 2017, six in seven secondary school adolescents in Malaysia, which aged 13 to 17 were active internet user. One in five adolescents are depressed and two in five are anxious.

This is alarming and concerning as this should not happen to young adults. They should be busy studying and constructing plans for their future careers. If this issue is not catered in earlier stages, it could lead to a bigger problem.

We might be social animals, but we cannot let social media’s corrosive effects affect us negatively.

Be it among youths or even among adults, everyone should be mindful not to activate the social media self-destruction button that could destroy us inside out. Validation on our true self should not be in the hand of others, it is us who can decide our self-worth.