Common theme among social media users (Twitter, Insta etc) is that the majority have been cleverly programmed to froth for more followers + engagement but never stop to factor the possible downsides of being in the limelight. In essence, it's not the flex they think it really is!
Easiest thing to spot online is somebody that consciously or unconsciously reeks of desperation and a voracious appetite for online attention. Appearing to be hexed of some irresistible force that compels them to seek for constant feedback from their online strangers.
The identity you have as an online newbie, influencer differs from the one you take on as your audience grows. And the hardest thing to determine is the degree to which your mind and online persona is progressively influenced by the time tastes and preferences of your audience.
Your ideal image, the person you want to be, gets over shadowed by your brand image, the person your audience expects you to be. This desire of attention from online strangers lures you to be whatever they wish you to be since it's them that incentivise you with engagement.
You then become a parody of yourself —forced to refine your personality in the eyes of countless strangers and yet the people for whom you mould yourself to be are an abstract illusion. The virtual world f*cks with alot of people beyond their capacity to articulate this damage.
The more you imagine yourself through the eyes of others, the more you replace your own identity with one custom-made for the audience. Their gaze upon you becomes your dressing mirror causing you to exaggerate the idiosyncratic facets of yourself to suit their likeability.
What's the true price of followers + engagement if your person ends up subsumed by your persona resulting into a caricature of yourself? How many times have you seen huge accounts break character —deviate from what people expect of them or made them likeable in the first place?
That their is their burden! Their online identity is hinged on the artifice of performance so they unwittingly become prisoners of the online persona they created. Their posts aren't always indicative of their entire world view but they're constricted by what an audience expects.
Their audience expects them to be the same person they were yesterday lest they feel inauthentic to themselves or their audience. Clinging to the affection an audience directs to the role they play but not necessarily who they truly are. This is the genesis of the soul's entropy.
Overtime, in spite of an admirable following + good engagement they start to feel like imposters surviving on the dopamine their audience feeds them. Worshipped online but social outcasts in reality. Only a few break character and remain true to themselves. That's the trade off!
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