SME – By Managing Editor/Manal Abu Al-Ela
Deputy Director of the International Women’s Federation (IWKBF) for the Middle East and Africa
manalabualula@smenews.ae
Have you ever seen a genie in a box? Have you become friends and trusted it with all your secrets? Have you tried to impersonate it, until your identity became a thing of the past? Yes, this is what is called erasing your identity—your genetic makeup, contaminated by this black box you hold in your hands.
In this chaos we live in, and even create, we are guided by this piece of metal that almost never leaves our hands, even after we sleep. It pulsates with life and clings to you like a parasitic “suction” fish that penetrates the top of a shark’s body to suck its blood. Yes, your life has changed, and you’ve become a human being struggling against instinct and nature, trying to cling to a lifestyle that is incompatible with your genes and atoms in this world. Most humans have become monsters, just as everything else has been transformed since the beginning of the last century. Creativity has vanished, and people have lined up, willingly rushing to adopt the deformed technology that struggled against this dark change before it turned your life into hell.
Instead of unleashing creativity, tradition is taken as a beacon, and false perfection as an anchor. You are driven by strong winds of deviant customs and methods that can alter your nature and even your entire personality within a few months. You appear in a completely new guise, using “filters” that can completely obscure your true features.
The Illusion of Perfection
No one publishes a photo of themselves at their worst. No one broadcasts their moments of self-doubt, their tears of loneliness, or their confusion in the face of life. All we see is the “best version”: a thoughtful angle, a soft filter, a perfect background, and words that polish the narrative until it looks like a scene from a lifeless movie.
But this “carefully curated content” doesn’t tell us the truth. It doesn’t tell us that behind the smile is effort, perhaps sadness. It doesn’t tell us that the photo that garnered thousands of likes cost its owner a hundred attempts and an unseen amount of anxiety.
Teenagers today don’t just live in their own reality, but in a parallel reality created by social media. Daily comparisons with “perfect bodies,” “dream relationships,” “super-successes,” and “immaculate elegance.” Under these artificial standards, many of them feel they’re not enough, they don’t fit in, they don’t deserve it.
Psychological pressures multiply, and feelings of inadequacy grow, not because they’re inferior, but because they compare themselves to ghosts that only exist behind screens.
People have stopped sharing the truth and have begun designing their lives like a product. Every post is a marketing campaign for oneself, for success, for beauty, for happiness. Amid this constant marketing, the lines between reality and fantasy, between “who I am” and “what I show about myself” have been blurred. We don’t see people; we see what they want us to see. And that’s a fundamental difference.
Returning to Self
The solution isn’t to escape social media, but to make peace with it. To learn how to use it without allowing it to be used against us. To follow those who inspire us, not those who worry us. To differentiate between truth and falsehood, between “beautiful content” and “a beautiful life.” Don’t compare your beginning to someone else’s.
Ask yourself: Is this post beneficial or draining?
Get out into reality: speak, move, live.
Let your circle of influence include people who are like you, not those who compete with you.
Human reality, for beauty lies in imperfection.
Let’s remember that real life doesn’t need a filter. What makes us human is our fragility, our complexity, our attempts, our repeated falls and rises. Follow those who remind you of that. Those who share the experience, not the show, the path, not just the end. So don’t be a pretty picture that people will like, but rather live a real life that satisfies you.
