Stereotypes: Fantasy Over Reality

A fantasy is often created when one is imaging things that are impossible or improbable.It may be great at times, such as when reading a book, although when one begins to prefer fantasy over reality, it becomes a problem. Being constantly preoccupied by a fantasy may lead to mental health issues as one is not at terms with what they have in life. Social media provides a massive world to escape to with false promises and the facade of a perfect life. This is dangerous as when people see a perfect life they begin to notice the flaws in their own. This is commonly seen on the app Instagram which has 400 million monthly active users, more than 75 daily active users and 52% of them between the ages of 13-17. As the popularity of Instagram is on the rise, teens are given …show more content…
Although, it morphs from a tool for connection into a tool for validation. For many people, the purpose of uploading a picture instead becomes the number of likes it will eventually receive. This in turn has a profound influence on self-esteem, particularly amongst teenage girls who are often going through a difficult and unstable part of their lives. Most pictures that are posted on Instagram are not taken with one shot, a lot of effort is put into taking that picture, turning into an obsession. Photos on Instagram give the illusion of a perfect life by only letting people glimpse into that “perfect moment”. Similarly, celebrities, good-looking people, and beauty icons create very hard to reach beauty standards because viewers never get to see their ordinary life just the pictures they post online. As young people feel inferior to the beauty icons they worship on social media it benefits many companies because then in reaction they will go to the store to buy products to alter their appearance. Instagram promotes its app by paying these people for their page views and likes