It gets overwhelming sometimes with consumerism and capitalism piercing into every media platform and every public space. From one post that you spend just a little too much time looking at, to an echo chamber of similar posts built to make you feel like you are lacking something. You are lacking substance, you are not interesting enough, you are not up to date with the latest trends, you have not saved enough money to buy this or to have that. You are not working hard enough, look at that 21 year old multi-millionaire who was able to retire his parents. Wait, you don’t have a car?

A lot of us experience this and are painfully aware that social media is tearing us apart. It is constantly making us feel less than, not enough, and yet we can’t seem to part from it. The connection that is lost from our friends, the not being in the loop of things, the feeling of being left out from the rest of the world. Of course we would feel that way; the only way people connect these days are through Instagram DMs and likes on your stories. The truth is, we are too far into the system to break free from it. We all have attempted to go cold turkey, to delete our apps and to find other alternatives. But so much of our lives and our societies are built around social media platforms that not having that seems to deprive us of our sense of belonging and interconnectedness. How ironic, then, is that the very fundamental need to belong forces us into a space where we never feel like we do.

I am beginning to think that feeling like you are not good enough as you are, has become an inseparable part of modern society. Imagine if we all felt like we were enough, just as we are at this very moment and for the foreseable future. Maybe we will not feel the need to buy more things, to experience more life by travelling, and maybe we would not even need to have a job. What then would happen to our society? Perhaps, the most apparent effect would a crashing economy and the doom of social constructs as we know it. It seems that capitalism has, unfortunately, become the very fabric of human civilization and human psyche.

As a school counsellor, almost every student that comes in to see me has expressed feelings of inadequacy in one way or another. This begs the question of whether this experience and its implications on our well-being and functioning, necessarily makes someone “ill” if everyone is going through the same phenomenon. Why then, do we encourage the pursuit of feeling enough? “Be comfortable in your own skin”, ” you are uniquely you”, “never compare yourself with others”. These repetitative, idealistic statements no longer seem grounded in a world that screams otherwise. In fact, hearing these things would probably send the person spiralling even deeper into their already excruciating thoughts that something is wrong with them and questions about why can’t seem to stay afloat.

As long as social media lives to see another day, we will be entrenched in this cycle of inadequacy. And perhaps that is what has been keeping humans existing for the last 300 millenials. It has kept civilisations working harder, finding new solutions, making more inventions, and striving to be better. Perhaps, the overall cost that this has on our mental health will one day tip the scale, outweighing the productivity it has seen.