Harrison Joseph Kent

OPINION: I quit social media. You should too.

I stopped using social media platforms — aside from Snapchat as a simple messaging app — about a year and a half ago. Since I've stopped, I haven't so much as looked back. The constant comparison of viewing other people's lives to my own eventually wore me down. On social media, everyone only ever shows the grandeur of life while leaving out the unpleasantries. From a teenager's point of view, this created an unrealistic expectation of what my life was then, and what it should be in the future. I created a very different impression of living, far from reality. Whenever the difficulties of ordinary day-to-day life came along, they created a harsher impact because I wasn't living up to this preconceived notion of life always being perfect.