Why The Selfie Needs To Go

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Get “Taps” playing and bow your head for a moment of silence. It’s time for selfies, and everything they stand for, to go. There, I said it.

First and foremost, let’s specify what I mean by “selfie.” I’m talking about every female douche Instagram selfie that is just screaming for affirmation and every male gym mirror selfie doing the same. Pretty much, all the narcissistic bullshit you see all over your feeds on various social media platforms. Please continue on with your patriotic, hilarious, and/or unbelievably rare selfies for the greater good of humanity. It’s time for “someone elsies.”

As I’ve said before, we are both one of the greatest and one of the suckiest generations to walk this planet in a long time. We bring a fuck-ton to the table, but we also love to remind people of that. As I’ve grown older, I’ve learned the value of being humble. Yes, I admit that’s pretty easy when I usually look as sexually ambiguous as Tilda Swinton, graduated with a 3.3 GPA, and am just really starting my “career” (whatever the fuck that means) at 24 and a half. I get it. Not so hard for a Simple Sally like me to be humble. The point is, collectively, we love ourselves. And the selfie is the pinnacle of this. It’s also evidence that maybe our love affair with ourselves has gone too far.

There’s something about the perfectly lit, timed, and filtered selfie that drives me bonkers. We don’t see you; we see how you want us to perceive you. We see those perfect angles and shading and all that doodoo. If every picture is as tailored as your selfie, then where is your personality? This isn’t high school anymore. People aren’t drawing wood because you just got your braces off. We want to know who you are and what you bring to the table besides perfect brows and unnecessary cleavage on your way to the gym. I mean, don’t get me wrong. I’ve spent a good couple of hours in my day curating my Facebook profile and eliminating almost all the pictures of my double chin. But no, there’s not a single selfie in there, because I’m not that special. I don’t want you to look at me and think that all I care about is how I look, and, more specifically, how I look to you. I don’t want that mostly because I don’t care about that as much as I care about other things, but even if I did, that would defeat the purpose.

There’s nothing wrong with admitting you care about what others think, but to create a forum for others to judge solely based on your face or butt or abs is just ludicrous. Oh wait, there goes Tinder. But you know what I mean. One of the first things that shocked me about living in New York City was the realization that of the millions of extremely good looking people there, so few of them are interesting. I have never had as many boring conversations in my life. Maybe I was spoiled in that I was surrounded by dynamic people at school, but surely that’s not the exception, right? There’s no way the selfie isn’t the epitome of self-absorption, and frankly, we have so much more than that. If you’re one of those quasi-interesting people, for the love of baby Jesus, stop making everything we see of you revolve around that one facet of your personality. As Coach McKay would say, “Change it up”..

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Mary Swanson

Both a bitter and optimistic 24-year-old entry-level underachiever with 2-4 friends and 0 talents. Washed up is an understatement. I prefer almost all my food luke-warm, what does that say about me?

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