Living a Double Life Fueled by Social Media

Living a Double Life Fueled by Social Media Student’s Name Institutional Affiliation Living a Double Life Fueled by Social Media Wilde Oscar’s The Importance of Being Earnest depicts myriad social issues that were prevalent during the nineteenth century. The most outstanding of these issues include adopting false identities, class and social distinctions, identity and language, and gender roles. Despite the scenes portraying lives of people over two centuries ago, these themes resonate with the lives of people in our current society. Critical to this discussion is the assumption of false identities that different characters in Wilde Oscar’s The Importance of Being Earnest adopt, including Jack, Algernon, and Cecily. The twenty-first century is not different regarding the issue of false identities, especially with the proliferation of social networks that makes the entire endeavor seemingly easy to achieve. Different people within society seamlessly adopt false identities using social network platforms, which beg the question: what do people derive by living double lives fueled by social media? While social media promotes the proliferation of double identities, underlying social issues portray different dimensions in our society that favor quick fixes through social media. Social networks constitute revolutionary tools that have contributed to immense disruptions in various industries while creating opportunities for countless others. Nonetheless, the visual realities created by social media has continued to mount insurmountable amount of stress and pressure on the lives of social media users to keep up with the magnificent lives of other users. However, unbeknownst to them, more than half of the social media users lead double lives marked by false identities. Wilde Oscar’s play The Importance of Being Earnest highlights the false lives of different characters, including Jack, Algernon, and Cecily, who are on a mission to achieve their goals using their false identities. This revelation is not surprising given that society has carried along with the behavior to the twenty-first century. In a detailed reported given by Scarfo and Zeidler ( 2018), a whopping 28 percent of American millennials admit to deliberately pretend to look wealthier on social media, creating the false identity of themselves whereas the situation of their personal lives looks dire. The increasing trend reflects on the pressure that society continues to pile on people, who in return, circumvent by assuming false identities to create an admirable reputation for the public to see. While adopting false identities may seem like a quick solution to concede to the pressures of the society, more dangers lurk in the realities of the financial lives of social media users. Scarfo and Zeidler (2018), note that money is the main motivation for people who lead double lives depicting themselves as wealthy. Nevertheless, issues of personal finance are a great challenge to the majority of Americans who struggle to keep up in their public image while struggling in their personal lives. For instance, it is worrying to note that nearly 50 percent of Americans cannot handle a $400 cash emergency without borrowing cash to take care of the emergencies (Scarfo and Zeidler, 2018). The insatiable need to look admirable and worthy in public life is creating a disaster that will result in unending pressures and unhealthy standards. For instance, Scarfo and Zeidler (2018) note that 71 percent of young adults have admitted to purchasing something that they did not need, but had to have it. Such pressure is driven by the unending glamour and opulence sensation that the social media creates. Wilde Oscar’s play, The Importance of Being Earnest, paints a society whose members feels better when they misrepresent themselves by creating false identities. Majority of people in their mid-twenties and their early thirties have fallen prey to the pressures of social media, are forced to set up double social media accounts. Alya Mooro terms the two accounts as “Instagram”, a social media accounts that carry personal and realistic moments and that is exposed to only close friends and family; and “Rinstagram”, a public accounted mostly containing curated and edited photos that aim at creating an online sensation and a commanding following for various reasons. While Instagram provides the platform for both identities to exist, pressure from the public dictates and divides the secretive personal account from the public ‘brand’ account. The scenario created in Instagram is also common in other social media platforms, suggesting the influence social media has had on the personal decisions of people regarding which life to portray to the public, versus a person’s portrayal to personal friends. Most seemingly successful men live a double life — portraying false identities. In one of the lives, these people are successful businessmen or are seen as people who have successful careers. The post on social media sites their well-groomed images while in the beautiful sceneries. Make-ups and photo editing have also been useful to these people so that they can show to the world how good their lives are (Greene, 2011). In the second lives, these people are just ordinary men. They live stressful and depressed lives due to the double standards of living. Th...