We’ve been kind of feeling a bit out of touch with reality lately, anyone else? Who knew living through a global pandemic would be this confusing and chaotic? For almost two years now, our entire lives have moved online. And we thought we already spent too much time engrossed in social media.

We don’t know about you, but we could easily rack up 6 plus hours on social media per day! That’s a bit mad really, isn’t it? Like what’s on it that is so addictive? It’s not like we can go anywhere and show off anything? But still, day in and day out we are still drawn in by either Molly Mae Hague heading out to Tesco or your one down the road posting her daily walks.

2021 has taught us a lot here at Shona, but we’ve also learned a lot of lessons from social media and we’re going to give you the low down.

 

You’re worth is not determined by your follower count.

Ok, so we won’t lie to you and say we’ve never thought about being Instagram or TikTok famous because that looks pretty fun. However, whether you have millions of followers or just 10, you are just as worthy as anyone else. So where are we going with this? Well, you know that picture of you and your dog out playing in the grass that you put up? Yep, that is just as important and just as worthy to be out there in the world as any other piece of content on the old interweb! So if you don’t get thousands of likes, please don’t take it down.

 

Trolls are hurt people.

One of the most important messages The Shona Project shares is that “hurt people, hurt people” and just because people are online, doesn’t change anything. Trolls are often seeing things in your social media posts that they wish they had themselves. They are often hurting and the only way they know how to cope is to lash out. We have learned to try our best to not engage with the mean comments, but when we have to, we tend to keep this important point in mind and not be hurtful back.

 

If an account is making you feel bad about yourself, unfollow.

2021 has taught us that there is actually a use for that little button that gives you FOMO. Yep, we’re talking about the unfollow button. Our Shona Instagram feed is always full of such positive and heart-warming content and we often found ourselves scrolling through the Shona account rather than our own. Then it hit us. We always felt down after being on our personal accounts. Why you may ask? We were following the wrong type of accounts. We sat back and had a long think of what content we want to see and did a big clear out of who we followed. BEST. DECISION. EVER.

 

Things aren’t always as they seem.

Only recently, people are starting to expose the amount of time and energy that has to go into getting that one “perfect” post. We’ve previously written an article on some of the ladies that shared a picture that is truly them which you can check out here. So basically what we learned was that even the people in the pictures don’t look like that. Our personal favourite though is Roz Purcell. She has no problem sharing what all the other pictures that didn’t make it to the Gram looked like. Check out one of her most recent posts below.

What else have you learned from social media? Let us know on our socials @shonadotie or at [email protected]

If you would like to support us and the work that we do,  you can donate below