Hi👋🏽 I’m Kat. I help navigate difficult conversations and teach women how to negotiate on their own terms. Welcome to my version of a newsletter where I’ll be reminding you to show up for yourself. You may listen (above) or read (below). You’re doing great, sweetie. Remember you’re all you have. So welcome and thanks for being here.✨ About a week ago I asked my IG friends what they wanted to read in my newsletter. Social re-entry anxieties surrounding post-pandemic polled highest (which I wrote about last week). And followed by this hot topic: Social pressures to fit in. Which I’m about to get into right now.
We can’t talk about social pressures without acknowledging the mother source of all pressures: social media. The need to keep up with the Joneses (or Kardashians, whichever is relevant to you) feel more pervasive since its advent. Our perceptions are bombarded by our peers’ highlight reels sparking an intrigue as we peek into their lives followed by a hint of envy from whatever is missing from ours. When we see something trending online we immediately join the bandwagon to feed our insecure, bottomless FOMO monster. When we see cause-initiatives flooding our feed, we immediately participate without thinking twice. We post that black and white selfie (#ChallengeAccepted) or use specific hashtags to simply show our support about something without much effort. If we see that our peers are into it, we join the party. Because everyone’s doing it.
I often wonder, how many people stop to think before actually following suit? How many people pause to question if it’s even real, meaningful or effective? Or if it’s even really relevant? How many ponder if these social norms and expectations befit who we are before opting in? Or do we follow these trends simply because we want to fit in regardless if it resonates with us or not?
As a tiya, I worry about my niece’s and my nephew’s future when I see the stuff they are exposed to these days. One doesn’t need to scroll far enough in any digital feed to witness the kinds of overt and subtle social pressures that now bombard our kids. Although social pressures are not unique online, it just happens to be where we spend a lot of our time these days. This leads me to wonder if the kinds of influences presented online are really that much different from the ones I grew up with. In a way, they are worse. On average we roughly spend two and a half hours per day mesmerized by our digital devices, where we unknowingly realize brands and marketers are dictating what we see, how to think and what we should care about. We’re seeing only a fraction of the world through the lens of digital algorithms. And yet we perceive these tiny, narrow windows as if they’re the full picture when in fact, we’re only seeing a slither. And some of them are not even real. The only thing real is the heavily curated content snapped for a specific moment frozen in time to make all of us believe it’s part of a contiguous reality. Most of us are not trained in critical thinking so we absorb information like sponges purporting that everything we see or hear to be true. (And in case you didn't know: Not everything we see is real or true.)
I have a love-hate relationship with social media and the more I reflect about this medium, the more I recognize it as the new face of the old social pressures I grew up with just in a shinier, brighter seemingly harsher new filter. And it’s worse because these pressures are way more cunning than ever before. These influences and expectations are much smarter at infiltrating our reality because it’s bombarding us 24/7. And we obligingly consume without question. The content we see produces the expectations that young men and women are pressured to meet in order for them to be accepted, adored and validated by society and their peers.
Of course the pressure to fit in is not exclusive to the youth. Let’s face it, adults feel it in the same intensity. We’re just better at hiding them or pretending that we don’t care. But the reality is we do. The need for belonging is critical to our human survival. This is why we adapt, assimilate, adjust and accept certain social pressures because we’re human. We’re wired to want to belong. The unsurprising though rarely discussed part about fitting in and succumbing to these pressures is that eventually everyone becomes a cookie cutter version of someone else. If you haven’t noticed, check the next time you scroll your social media feed and see how everyone is the same. We’re all practically the same people living the same lives. You can’t even tell the difference among the sea of influencers.
I wish I could say this realization comes with age but unfortunately, so many adults remain stuck in the vicious cycle of keeping up with their peers. The proof is everywhere. It’s in our credit card statements where we spend wildly beyond our means. It can be visible in our behavior wavering between people-pleasing and to the other extreme being narcissistic or careless just to prove we’re nonconforming. We associate the number of social likes and comments we receive as proof of validation - our social currency. We believe the larger our following, the higher our value. The need to fit in feels normal until some point along the way, it feels unnatural. We realize we don’t need to blend in or be like everyone else because it’s not who we are. At some point, we become tired of the lies and our own bullshit. Once we stop seeking others’ stamp of approval for our existence, we evolve.
I mentioned in a past post (see Note #12) about why showing up as the true version of who we are is critical; representation is especially important for kids, who are really just little adults in training. We don’t want kids to repress their authenticity (just because we grown ups have done it) just to make society feel comfortable. To teach them to live fully is by showing them what it means to be unapologetic about who they are. And it starts with each of us, showing up just the way we are.
It takes strength to be different. To veer off from the crowd. To dare to be ourselves. We already know so much of the world we see is fake and curated. And sometimes it’s hard to even know what’s real or not. So don’t we deserve a little truth and realness in the midst of all of that? What does it mean to break the mold? It takes courage to be ourselves because it requires us dropping all that pretension. When we give up pretending, we end up giving up our old ways, old relationships and old way of life. So of course, it requires a little bravery to leave that behind.
The world deserves to witness the real us, and not a cloned version of someone else. We may lose a few things along the way but as they say, what we lose when finding ourselves, were never real in the first place. But imagine everything else we stand to gain: the freedom to live life openly as ourselves. And if you ask me, no amount of social currency can ever match that.
xx
Kat✨
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