By Ava Schwab | Reporter
The connection is strong, four bars of service and a fully charged battery. Everything is promising when someone asks for a new friend’s contact information, only to have the person ask the famous words: “Can I get your snap?”
While this kind of interaction has become normalized among Generation Z, the truth is, as adults, communication should extend beyond selfies and streaks. Especially with recent emphasis on organic connection, it’s surprising how many people still prefer a back-and-forth game of face wars rather than in-person connection. According to Pew Research, 65% of U.S. adults under the age of 30 use Snapchat.
As a consequence, community has grown weak. Relationships founded on daily snapshots from a selfie camera result in surface-level connections. The best friends list is simply surface-level connections with faces.
Not only this, but it amplifies vanity and delusion. Staring at your face for hours a day, posing to make you look as attractive and poised as possible, is not only embarrassing for those who know you in real life but also detrimental to self-confidence. It breeds both insecurity and vanity, perpetuating Snapchat’s reward cycle. What’s worse, the two can combine and leave each user a mess of insecurities, masked by the pursuit of just the right angle.
According to Forbes, the average Snapchat user, who is a significant portion of college-age kids, opens the app around 30 times a day. There is even an emergence of Snapchat Dysmorphia syndrome, which has “raised ethical and medicolegal concerns for cosmetic and plastic surgeons.” Snapchat is a dated form of social media that users hold onto because of the reward cycle of vanity and instant gratification.
I see it still in so many people who, frankly, are way too old for this. If you want a career after college, do your mental health and authenticity a favor and move on from old habits. Snapchat feeds a self-destroying cycle.
Enough is enough; it is time to delete the app everyone downloaded in sixth grade. It’s time to prioritize genuine communication and connection.
The further society veers into the depths of online messaging, the closer we get to isolation. Take a break, ask your friends to go to dinner, go outside and be grateful for your body and who you have in your life.
