My wife and I are boring people.  We've never been the types to worship celebrities.  We may follow bands or musicians that we enjoy, and the odd comedian or actor.  But we absolutely *do not* follow influencers.

Many of the arguments directed towards the detrimental impact social media has on mental health stem from said influencers or out-of-touch celebrities.  Seeing their "highlight reels", so to speak, fosters an unrealistic depiction of reality.  Their lives are glamourous (or so we are led to believe).  What am I doing wrong to where I can't go on multiple international vacations every year?  Where are my washboard abs and flawless skin?

But, again, we make it a point to stay away from that stuff.  We do follow lots and lots of meme pages, however.  Here recently, we've both felt fairly down in the dumps.  Chalk part of it up to SAD, but our discussions of our mental states went a bit deeper the other night.  We got on the subject of social media, which progressed into us acknowledging that neither one of us still follow any pages which we'd consider harmful to our perceptions of life.

That's when we had a fairly big realization: even the meme pages can knock you down a peg.  Let me elaborate.

A few of our favorite pages are iamthirtyaf, 30andtired, and mycovidjourney on Instagram.  These pages are typically funny as hell, and we adore the content posted.  Out of all the stuff my wife and I tend to share across IG, posts from those are the most frequent.  If you're unfamiliar with these pages, they tend to lampoon life after young adulthood.  For example, they shared a Tweet recently that said:

*"MTV should make a show called 'My Super Sweet 16: Take 2' with 32 year olds who have to pay for everything themselves and none of their friends want to leave their houses to come."*

I laughed at that.  A lot.  I laugh at most content similar to this.  But what we realized the other night is the long-term impact seeing things like this might have had on us.  Constantly being told "lol, you're getting older and life is kind of awful", even if it has a humorous slant to it?  Yeah.  You really start to buy into that after a while.

We've decided to mute these pages and similar ones for a few months.  If nothing else, we'll have a blast catching up in the spring.  But we felt like we could use a break from our phones telling us over and over that growing up and getting older *is a bad thing*.

Just something to think about for my fellow thirtysomethings out there.  Even if you avoid the "bad" parts of social media, please remember that any sort of negativity can take its toll after a while.