19 Year Old Instagram Star Essena O'Neill Reveals Why She's Quitting Social Media (11 pics)
- Category: Pics |
- 5 Nov, 2015 |
- Views: 6741 |
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Essena O'Neill is a 19 year old Instagram model from Australia and she's become a very hot topic on the Internet. After building up a following of 750,000 people on Instagram and 250,000 people on YouTube, Essena has decided to quit social media. She says she feels like social media isn't authentic and she's altered her perfect photos and added captions that tell the truth about what was really going on.
“I was obsessed with ‘likes’. Well, really, I was obsessed with the idea of being liked by others,” she wrote on her website. “I somehow managed to convince myself that when I was ‘Facebook Famous’ I would forever be happy. I figured, the more people that clicked ‘like’ on my photos, the more people actually liked me in real life. Pretty simple right? To be Facebook Famous meant everyone liked you. Girls wanted to be your friend, boys wanted to date you. Everyone talked about you, watched you, stalked you, wanted to be you. It was my dream at 15.”
“Girls would upload together and have sleepovers revolving around ‘watching their photos’. People would gossip about likes at school, over text, to teachers, to parents… ‘She got 200 likes, she’s basically a model now’.”
“Craving attention validated through social media I believe shows a gap in real life connections.”
“We just keep putting up staged photos in desperate hopes others will approve. I have a lot to learn… but I am enough. Right here, right now, I am enough. I don’t have to be or do anything, I am already everything I want to be… it lives inside of me. Not on a screen.”
