37 hours per week. It is not the number of hours we spend at work, but what some studies refer to as the time we spend on social networks. And it doesn’t surprise us, because posturing requires your time and effort. We are already immersed in this culture of exposing our lives or what we would like our lives to be on social media, eagerly awaiting the approving feedback we desire. And since sometimes we reach very delusional points, in this article we are wondering how it affects psychologically wanting to posturing continuously. And we have come to a conclusion. These are the mental level effects of posturing:
What is the posture?
- But, what is this posturing? According to the Dictionary of the Spanish Language, it is the attitude of adopting certain customs or activities more for the purpose of wanting to appear or make a good impression than out of pure conviction. That is, you pose when you get up from the sofa where you were so comfortable to cook those chocolate muffins that are luxurious only to upload them to Instagram or Facebook and receive many likes and a few compliments.
- Surely, you will have also gone out when you didn’t feel like anything to buy a fabulous decorative tray and a couple of vintage cups to add to the photo with the muffins, coffee and decorative styling. And all of this implies a large dose of creativity, we are not going to deny it, but it also implies a need to continually pose that interferes with your daily activities and in which, moreover, we intuit a problem of the need to be liked or to feel accepted.
- You may not pose with confectionery, you may do it with natural landscapes, with wonderful cafeterias, with the shows you go to, with dinners with friends, with your dressing room, with your makeup, with your hair or with your skills dancer. With whatever, what counts here is the times you do something to upload it to the networks without taking into account if that is what you most wanted to do at that moment.
- Miquel Sánchez Farrando in his Final Degree Project (The irruption of Instagram) for the Autonomous University of Barcelona, makes this other reflection about posing: ” The posing enters the scene when the image shows something outside of the true or real. It is in other words, the fact of publishing a photo going to or being in the gym would be posturing if we only took the photograph and then did not do any type of physical activity in it. The problem with this concept is that it is becoming more general in such a way that it reaches a point at which the concept loses its real meaning, since, originally […], this is not associated with all appearances; only with false ones”.
The psychological effects of posturing at all hours
- Posturing is living in the face of others, waiting for the reaction of others, waiting for the opinion and evaluation of others. When you pose you become another person, happier, more attractive, smarter, wittier, funnier, more active, with more friends, with more money, with more art, with more class, with more initiative, with more motivation, with more success. Isn’t it fabulous? Sure, it’s fabulous, but what about when you’re not posing? Who are you when you spend a few hours at home alone with yourself without going online? Are you able to recognize yourself in that person who receives so many likes?
- People who want to post continuously sooner or later feel the so-called impostor syndrome and end up sinking into the feeling of fraud that invades them when the lights go out, in this case on social networks. But there is still more, because wanting to pose all the time erodes self-esteem in such a subtle way that it takes a long time to realize it.
- Because at first the glory you get thanks to your posture (which also has its merit, we insist) doesn’t let you see reality. You feel strong, you feel loved, you feel admired, you feel powerful, you notice that you are interested and, above all, you feel happy. Is there anything better than that feeling? There isn’t, it’s true, it’s the ideal sensation but the detail is that in the case of posturing it’s not real. And sooner or later you come face to face with reality.
- It’s not that your life is miserable, but you can come to think so because of that erosion of self-esteem we’re talking about. Your self-esteem rises with likes and interactions. And it goes down at the same rate when you look around and see that your reality has nothing to do with your Instagram account.
- And what do we do? Because it is very difficult to get off at this stage of the frenetic pace of posturing that we have. Well, one option is to combine posturing with naturalness in our networks, like the before and after, like the one with and without a filter. And, above all, fill our profiles with a little sense of humor about the reality of social networks.