News Flash: Social Media is Not Real Life

 

In Christian circles, they say it's easy to remember the people that influenced you and hard to remember the sermons that did the same. One talk I do recall was some 30 years ago, where the speaker warned us about excessive TV watching, mainly because the passivity of consuming content that way was dangerous to our actively processing information. Meaning that TV was bad not because the content was trash (although certainly a lot of shows are in fact garbage from a moral standpoint), but that even wholesome content rendered our brains like couch potatoes, being told when to be scared and when to be happy, what was good and evil, and above all what products to buy that would make our lives better.

Almost as a throwaway line, incidental to his point, but I have remembered it to this day so clearly it lodged in at least one audience member's mind, he observed that at any rate what you see on TV isn't real life, in at least three ways. One is that shows, as entertainment, are mindful of taking their audience on a narrative arc in the span of a single episode, whereas the pacing of real life isn't as fast, ordered, or predictable, so we can struggle with knowing where we are in the stories that make up our own lives without similar prompting. Two is that TV shows emphasize the most exciting parts of a life or community or story, whereas in real life most of our life is boring things like sleeping and paying bills and running errands, so our own lives can feel slow and boring compared to what we see on the small screen. Three is that the people featured on TV shows are among the most beautiful, fit, and well-dressed in our society, making us feel ugly and raggedy in comparison.

Social media in 2026 is a far more advanced and pernicious version of this point. A 22-minute sitcom episode has given way to a 10-second video, packed with excitement and drama and featuring some of the most beautiful people you will never meet in real life made up to the nth. Perhaps it is obvious that social media is an extremely unrealistic mirror of the real world, but given how much of it we consume and how engrossed we get into it, it can conjure similar feelings of unfulfillment, poor self-image, and covetousness. Like TV or perhaps more so, we are not forced into this content but rather choose into it, either directly or through the algorithm feeding us what we've made clear we will like based on other things we've consumed. And so we are looking to be entertained, brought along for a fun ride and enjoying gawking at the beauty and glamour and riches showcased in the process. We can't help but find ourselves wishing what we see on social media to be our real life, and feeling smaller and less important when we realize it isn't.

Perhaps you consider I am exaggerating this. When we play violent video games or watch professional sports or lose ourselves in a trashy soap opera, we are not playing out some deep desire to shoot people or dunk a basketball or engage in marital drama. I hope you're right. Because I worry that we are being self-destructive by consuming clip after clip of beauty tips from impossible beautiful people, or extravagant parties and mansions and vehicles, or effortless success in business and arts, and think social media is the real life we want for our lives. It's a formula for self-loathing and self-destruction, which I don't want for myself or my loved ones.