Social Media or Social Worth?

This morning, I had the pleasure of actually waking up at a decent time (aka before noon) and enjoying a peaceful morning. Since I usually don't wake up this early, I didn't know what to do with myself. Initially, I wanted to drive to my favorite coffee shop because a) I like coffee, b) I like some well-spent Jesus time, and c) I like coffee...But then I remembered that my mom was working this morning, which meant I had little brother duty and couldn't leave the house.

But, I couldn't just sit there and do nothing. I'm the type of person who likes to constantly be doing something that I feel is productive or well-spent time--which may or may not include hours of netflix…guilty! Anywho, I decided I would take my dog on a nice little morning walk, because then I could take a cool picture of the sun coming up over the fields and post it on instagram. My dog gets a walk and I have something to post, so its a win-win right?

Do you ever go to hang out with someone and regardless of whether or not you're actually enjoying your time together, you are more worried about taking a picture to post and show the social media world that you are having fun? I am 110% guilty of this. One of my favorite, and also most convicting statements I've heard lately is, "If you didn't post a picture of it, then did it even actually happen?!" It's obviously an over-dramatized statement, but it poses a valid point.

I'm not saying that posting a picture of you having fun with your friends is bad, by any means. What I am saying, is what's the motive behind it? If I'm completely honest with myself, 80% of the time I'm not posting a picture because I'm just truly, genuinely having fun with my friends. Most of the time, it's because I look good in that picture, or I want so-and-so to see it, or my favorite one: It will look like I actually hang out with people! Ouch, when I reread this paragraph, I'm pretty disappointed in myself.

Our generation has a tool that no other generation has had before, that can reach thousands of people and go viral in an instant. But what do we choose to post on it? Man crush mondays, transformation tuesdays, woman crush wednesdays, throwback thursdays, flashback fridays, outfit of the days, selfie sundays, sub-tweets, and the list goes on. Theres a common tweet that has been circulating twitter lately that reads:

This tweet has circulated around so much, because of how true it is. The amount of value and self-esteem we find in social media is unbelievable--whether it's how many likes my picture can get, how many favorites or retweets my tweets get, how many followers I have, how many friends I have, how many responses and comments I receive on my blog, or as silly as it is, whether or not the guy I like posts a woman crush wednesday of me.  

Once again, it is not wrong to post and share things, and be flattered by the response that you receive; It's when our value, confidence, and worth is found in what we post. Out of curiosity, I googled the top hashtags of 2014 so far, and this is what came up:

I wish I could say that I was surprised to find that most of the top hashtags were attempts of vying for attention. Unfortunately, I wasn't shocked to say the least. 

As the tweet above says, If we really don't want our own children to find their value in social media, when are we going to do something to change it?