Last week, just days before Halloween, I saw a funny, but deep post. It said, “For Halloween, you should be the person you pretend to be on Facebook.” This brings me to this story.
An Australian model named Essena O’Neil quits modeling on social media. She became a star by posting bikini photos and other sexy pictures of herself on Instagram, You Tube and Tumblr. Now, O’Neil is taking them down. She’s now claiming the ‘perfect’ life she portrayed on social media sites was fake. And she’s writing such messages on her perfect looking photos. For instance, on one bikini clad photo, she writes about needing 100 takes and hardly eating that day to make her stomach look good. Another photo shows O’Neil practicing yoga on a beach. But she writes, “Nothing zen about trying to look zen.” Essena O’Neil claims she was paid hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars for these photos. Now she’s deleting all 2,000+ of her photos that she took in the name of money, self-promotion and social approval. Despite the money, modeling contracts, and over a half million followers, O’Neil says she was miserable inside. O’Neil says social media, “Is not real life”. But she’s not giving up the Internet altogether. ?Essena O’Neil renamed her Instagram page “Social Media isn’t Real Life” and will promote deeper causes, like vegan dieting.
This opens up a debate about so-called perfect lives on social media, and so-called images. All that glitters isn’t exactly gold. So when the next time you see the perfect 1950s-style family on your page, don’t envy them too much. You don’t know what they’re going through in real life. The next time you see a sexy body online, you don’t know the circumstances behind the photo, or even if the body is real or photoshopped (there! I said it!). The next time you see someone posing in a big house, maybe it’s not their house. The next time you see someone posing in a big fine car, maybe it’s not their car. And don’t get me started about these fools posting their big wads of money online. How broke are they? I applaud Essena O’Neil for exposing how fake social media can be. She’s right: Social media isn’t real life. What lessons can Essena O’Neil teach us?