Have you checked your Instagram feed lately? Chances are it’s full of blurry rainbows, plates of food, and the insufferable selfie. Nothing sets our blood a-boil quite like the selfie. Sure, there is nothing wrong with taking a few good headshots of yourself, but do we really need to see your face 5+ times a day? Ask the selfie taker and they’ll probably tell you yes.
The selfie is making us all narcissistic children. We are obsessed with how we look and feed off the likes and comments like a parasite feeds off its host. Constant use of social media has been linked to a variety of psychiatric problems that range from mild to potentially very serious. ADHD is a big one, presumably because we have so many tabs of social media open at once. Hypochondriasis could come from the criminal overuse of the WebMD app. However all of them pale in comparison to our narcissism; it knows no bounds.
Facebook is our social mirror, if you will. The more one updates, shares, and posts about oneself, the more narcissistic one tends to be. Twitter is used by young people to reach out and broaden their social circles to broadcast their views. This leads to a gross overestimate of the importance of their opinions and fuels the narcissism machine.
Is narcissism and inevitable reaction to our social culture? Check out this infographic and let us know what you think in the comments.
