Social media & mental health
Lifefaker.com is a fictitious website where you can purchase social media packages to create a veneered filter of your life to present to others.
Packages include: “Look At My Holiday And Cry”, “My Unachievable Body” , “I Just Happen To Live Here” and many more.
On Lifefaker you can buy perfect photos to present a fake image of your life. Yet, Lifefaker is a fake.
Why?
With Lifefaker.com, our goal was to use parody to highlight some of those unhealthy behaviours we all know exist on social media. As we become more aware of them ourselves, it can be easier to change them too.
Whilst it’s unfair to blame social media completely for poor mental health, there’s a clear link and we only need to look inwards to know there have likely been times when we’ve either been mindlessly scrolling, we’ve felt ourselves comparing ourselves to others or a social media post has triggered something for us.
The penetration of social media and technology into our every day lives has been a force to expose and shine a light on our mental health, in both positive and negative ways.
Our objective
The purpose of the Lifefaker campaign isn’t to shame anybody for their behaviour or to blame social media entirely, it’s to highlight social media’s powerful role within mental health and perhaps shed a light on our own unhealthy behaviours in our relationship with social media.
Whilst paying a swedish startup company for an armoury of beautifully crafted photography is highly exaggerated (and funny), it touches on the reality that social media can be used to present an unrealistic view of our lives which can be harmful to those posting and those consuming.
On the one hand, social media can be used to present a false image of your life, a way to garner “likes” to make us feel better or to boost our self-worth. On the other, it can be used as a way to judge ourselves and our lives, comparing ourselves to others and lowering our self-esteem.
This is a truth that many of us are aware of, many of us are subject to whether consciously or unconsciously and we’ve decided to take the bold step to uncover it and bring it to life.
What next?
The intention with this campaign wasn’t to “solve” mental health overnight or even radically shift social media usage in a day, we’re well aware social media is here to stay, as is mental health.
Our intention is that we all become more aware of our mental health in general, that we hear the message that we all have mental health just like we have physical health.
Particulary, we want to highlight that we all have a relationship with social media and that there is a direct relationship between social media and our mental health.
We want to make you more mindful of your social media usage, to ask yourself “why?” before you post or to take a breath before you scroll. We want you to use that unfollow button, take a social media detox or even use social media to present the true image of your life, not the desired one.
We’re here to name the truth, start and facilitate the conversation on mental health and social media.
