Millenials, Peer-Pressure and Social Media. Impacts on Interpersonal Relationships
I saw this one-minute video yesterday, and it got me thinking seriously about how social media has so pervaded our lives and society, so much that, unconsciously, our happiness and sense of achievement can be so dependent on the validation we get from followers, likers, tweeps and ‘mentioners’.
I vividly remember one Saturday morning, 5 years ago. I was at my friends’ place where I had passed the night. We both worked at the same advertising agency, and since we were both unmarried at the time, I tended to, more often than not, pass the night at his house, mostly on Fridays.
So, that Saturday morning, we both woke up at about past 7am, and were lying on the same bed, Blackberry phones in hand, backing each other and tweeting.
Without as much as ‘Guy how far’ or ‘Dude, what are we having for breakfast?’ we both were immersed in twitter till about past 12 noon. 5 solid hours of tweeting. I would mention him in a tweet, he would respond. He would tweet something, I would ‘like’ it, and we did not exchange a single word to each other for 5 hours!
Two guys who did presentations for a living on a daily basis were in the same room for 5 hours and did not say a word to each other for 5 hours because of Twitter!
It is very much normal now to ride with a lady for 2 or 3 hours in traffic, and all she would do is snapchat, tweet and take pictures for Instagram. So while you drive, she is in buried in social media. You are together, but not really together.
In homes today, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat has taken the time of couples. They stay on these media instead of communicating with each other. Is there any wonder why the percentage of marital separations is at an all-time high?
Couples cannot have a meaningful communication about their lives and future for 30 minutes, but the ladies particularly can gist about Big Brother Naija and whatever other gossip for hours without getting tired.
Millenials can be so buried in their make-believe social media world, that they do not hear what their partner is saying….until the bubble bursts and the partner gets tired of playing second fiddle to social media opinion. By then it is too late. Another celebrated social media relationship, broken.
Cases are rife of millenials who are not married, not because they do not have enough money to have a decent one day wedding, but because their other half believes the money, while good enough for a decent wedding, is not good enough for an Instagram wedding….so the wait continues.
For the purpose of clarity, a millennial is anybody born between 1980 and 1996, and Nigeria has over 100 million of them, (over 60% of Nigeria’s 185 million population) According to Gallup, “millennials are hyperconnected and technology-savvy social media mavens. To others, millennials are the new generation of highly indebted narcissists forever credited with coining the term "selfie."”
According to the Gallup report, 59% of millenials are either single or have never been married, neither are they in any hurry to marry. At their age, only 16% of Gen Xers and 10% of baby boomers were not married.
Infact, the millenials that marry, do so either because all their friends are married and therefore they do not fit into the clique anymore; or because it appears cool to be married now; or because they have the means to have an expensive wedding that would be the talk of town, make their friends green with envy, and be a big social media topic for many days to come….rarely ever because “we believe it is the next step we want to take in our relationship”.
The hyper-connectedness and tech-savvy social media nature of millenials also ensures that every one of them is a mini-kardashian, with little or no privacy, as they share every detail of their lives on social media. They share their location, itinerary and events with Instagram and Facebook, share their thoughts and vent their spleen with/on Twitter, share their moods and feelings (real or fake) with Snapchat, share what’s happening at the moment with Facebook live…..and have I mentioned how they have involved augmented reality via the use of filters on their phones to ‘be all they want to be’?
When a millennial shares a picture and does not get as many likes and comments as expected, depression sets in. There is self-doubt. “Am I not fine enough?” Hence, over time, the opinion of their followers on social media, many of whom they do not know in person, becomes the yardstick to measure the success of their lives. These opinions become the oracle whose divination is needed for them to make important decisions in their lives. “If I wear a long skirt, won’t my followers call me SU or worse more, unfollow me?” “If I have my wedding at X hall, won’t my followers think I’m the worst hit by the recession?” The need for validation by faceless audiences goes a step further by pushing millenials to live the instgram life. ‘Smile’. ‘Fake it till you make it’. ‘Whatever is happening, look glam to the world’. ‘Look like a superstar at all times’. Real life filters over real life realities.
The end-result is that their lives are mostly fake. They have very few real relationships and real friends, if any. In their bid to keep up with the joneses, they compromise their morals, cut corners, become unfaithful to their partners, even if it means rolling in the hay with married folks….all for some extra cash.
At the end, a Yoruba translated proverb says: The issue we try to keep away from the father, at the height of the matter, it is the same father that would bring a resolution to it. The perfect life that was put up on social media is eventually shown for what it is. A Fake.
Social media ought to be an improvement, an aid, leverage, an opportunity the baby boomers, the Gen X and Gen Y never had. It should not be an albatross!
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