Everyone doesn't need to know everything about you. Stop oversharing.
If you aren’t posting your entire life on social media at this point, are you even living life? In our society today, you can honestly find out anything that you need to know about a person just through a few clicks. Where someone lives, where they work, how many kids, what their parents do for a living, where they spend their time on the weekend, and even what they look like in the morning...our ancestors are cringing. Oversharing on social media is something that I think is inevitable at this point and the government is probably thrilled because we are taking a lot of work off of their hands *smiles in conspiracy theorist*
There are definitely levels to oversharing. You have the people who overshare their emotions, their wins/loses, and then you have the people who literally post their entire life on social media. I like to believe that I am a moderate oversharer. I am a rather open person about a lot of things in life but, there is also a lot of stuff that people don't know about me. I don't mind sharing the surface level things and I don't mind sharing my experiences. Ever since I was little, I believed I was meant to tell my story and help others. In order to do that, I have to make myself vulnerable. Some may say I share far too much but I simply just don't share what they do. I talk about my failed relationships while they will post themselves giving birth. There's a difference.
The things people are posting these days are very sickening to me. I saw a video the other day on twitter where a girl uploaded a very emotional video of her boyfriend. It was his first birthday since his mother passed and she got him a sentimental gift in memory of her. While it was a cute video, I do not believe that it should've been posted on social media, at all. Intimate moments to me are ones that should be kept in private. The fact that she posted the video made me question her intentions behind it, did she just do it for retweets? I don't understand how you can even think about sharing the video of your boyfriend crying due to the death of his mother. It makes no sense, what are you trying to gain from that? Clout points?
Another thing that I beg people to stop doing is oversharing their children!! I have very strict rules about allowing others to post my child on social media. Children are something that you must protect with your life. When you are posting them and all of their embarrassing moments on social media you are taking away their ability to form their own online presence. This is also why I am highly against parents making instagrams for their kids. Imagine if all of your embarrassing home videos where posted online. How would that make you feel? What if you went viral at the age of 5 for doing something silly and now you are forever known as the “butt naked nasty or nah” dancing kid? What kind of lessons are we teaching our children if we are posting their every move on the internet? We are showing them at an early age to seek validation through randoms on these apps. It’s baffling and weird to me when people post their new born babies, fresh out the womb still covered in gunk, what are you gaining from that? That is one of the most precious and most vulnerable moments of your life and you're willing to share it with a bunch of strangers?
Oversharing kills and ultimately takes the value out of life. I think that you have to find a happy medium in what you share and be cautious about it. Don’t post where you work, watch how you tag your locations so people can’t track you, don’t post your paychecks, stop posting all the illegal things you do on the weekend, stop posting your booty hole and calling it modeling, and most importantly stop posting your kids or other people's children.
Privacy is something that is so undervalued in the days of online clout chasing. I believe that it happens due to people looking for validation and also not knowing any better. Mainly, I think everyone wants to feel connected and important. Often times, you see influencers talking about how they want to open up more with their followers so that you all feel more connected to them. Shoot, I even catch myself saying this because it really is the more you share about your life on these apps the more people like you. We all want to make our lives seem perfect online so that leads to us to sacrificing our privacy for online attention.
People are risking their safety in order to show off their new apartment so that they can look more established in comparison to their peers. In contrast, they may be struggling to afford this apartment and may just be eating bread and water for dinner. The apartment looks pretty on their feed though, it’s a sick cycle. I firmly believe that oversharing has a lot to do with the depression rate going up. When you post a deep secret and you don't receive the likes you wanted too, you start to feel even more alone. This then leads to sharing even more details of your life searching for validation and the cycle just repeats. I am not saying that you need to keep everything private but you should be more cautious about what you share, say, and do on social media. Sure these people may be your friends but at the same time if they aren't someone you'd invite over or text personally about the issue, why are you posting it for them to see?
I pray for the generations to come. Social media has given us many blessings but it’s also destroying us. We are falling victims to this weird social construct that if you don't post it, it didn't happen. The biggest thing that I want you to take away from this post is to value your privacy. Don’t share every detail of your life. We don’t need to see your grandmother's tombstone, your child in the bathtub, or your “friends” in a drunken fight. As always remain mindful.
