[Rant] Being Ugly in a Largely Superficial Society

We all know about "influencers" and their perfect lives, perfect faces, perfect bodies, perfect everything. When photos became more widely available online, the became the near focal point of every post, everywhere. Which for the time was really neat! You could show people your life in a whole new way. I remember being able to upload a photo directly from my phone gallery directly to Facebook and being absolutely floored! Before this, I had to send my photos to my email address from my text inbox! (Anyone else do that lol?) Of course, this lead to the rise of the "selfie" and it became such a normal thing forever after, yadda yadda you know the rest.

I am not doing that boomer-ass thing where I complain about the youth having fun. No way! I think that what the kids do is just what the kids are doing. As long as they're not hurting themselves or others, I don't care what they do.

But these influencers amassed followings simply for being extraordinarily attractive and leading exciting lives complete with parties and travel. Then more started cropping up and companies started paying them to promote products, etc. The rest is history. This is the world we live in now.

What, I can hear you ask, does this have to do with being ugly? Get to your point! You shout. I'm getting to it.

Back then, before the rise of the influencer, we all knew that the impossible beauty of celebrities and runway models was unattainable for many. Influencers brought a sense of realism because these were personal accounts gaining popularity! These impossibly beautiful people could live in your apartment building, running their Instagram accounts and raking in thousands of follows and eventually, dollars.

We know now that most of it is all photo manipulation, poses, and make-up. But this "everyday person" stuff has stuck... Which has affected how society views it's "ugly" people.

"-puke emoji-" under a selfie of a woman without make up

"She thought she did something -skull emoji-" under another

I've seen it hundreds of times at this point and it's happened to me as well. An unending barrage of hate because you don't do all the posing, all the make-up, and all the rest of it. Some of us just don't want to put all that effort into just taking photos or we're just "ugly" by society's standards.

It's hard when this is just my face, dude. I'm not flawless. I have inflamed skin a lot. I have really oily hair that I can't manage to keep looking nice for more than a couple hours. I'm fat and have a double chin! But this is just ME... And now there's an expectation to look stunning all the time, especially online, where it matters least in my opinion. I'm just so tired of feeling shame for looking nothing like "the beautiful people" of society and actually *being* shamed by others. It's a dysmorphic nightmare.

So many individuals are like this now, especially younger people. They do it to each other in ways my mind can't even fathom. Everyday I am grateful my middle school years passed before Instagram, Tiktok, and smartphones in general reared their heads. I thought seeing cruel MySpace bulletins about you were bad.

This has been a messy incoherent mess. First history of influencers all the way down to cyberbullying. I hope you were able to see what I'm trying to get at here.

In short, I think the "girl next door" vibe of influencers have, well, influenced a whole different breed of shame for us common "ugly" people. Okthxbai.