Vanity? More like Insanity.

by Nora Al Saud

edited by Salma AlFouly and Rima AlEisa

 

 

 

NPD, Narcissistic Personality Disorder, is a personality disorder in which an individual is self-obsessed and has a distorted self image. Research has been shown, in the past generations, narcissism hasn’t been very much of a problem, but nowadays, we are living in an increasingly narcissistic society. Today, the internet, social media, selfies, likes, followers, comments, etc. has influenced many young adults/teens to become narcissists.

 

Being surrounded by narcissists in my everyday life and noticing their actions and how they crave attention, which I have noticed is mostly on social media, it interested me in knowing how narcissism is caused and what influences it.

 

Social media nowadays are causing people to become narcissists due to the likes people are getting, their amount of followers, and this causes their self esteem to skyrocket and that leads to them becoming self obsessed, having a distorted self image, and later on they become too occupied with their vanity.

 

It appears these days that the app store provides many applications that allows you to purchase likes on your instagram page, and according to my female anonymous source, although she doesn’t care about her likes, she thinks that what influences others to buy likes is if they get a lot of likes on a picture or on a selfie, their self esteem will raise, they’ll think highly of themselves, they’re going to want to post more selfies so that their self esteem will raise even higher than it was before.

 

According to the survey that AIS-R’s grade 8 students took, the results show that female students look at themselves in the mirror more often than the males and the female students also appear to care more about their likes on social media than the males do.

 

Although the results on the survey show that the females care more about likes on their social media pages, when I interviewed a male and a female student in grade 8, the male appeared to care much more about his popularity, likes, followers, his image to himself and to others, if people perceive him as popular or not, etc. Whereas, the female student states that she does not care whatsoever whether or not she gets many likes on her pictures, how many followers she has, or her popularity image.

 

The anonymous male source that was being interviewed appears to be a bit of a narcissist because his thought about the likes and followers were very much different than the anonymous female source, made him seem like he was too self-obsessed.

According to the male source, he believes that the people with not many likes don’t have a lot of friends. He also feels that they are below him because they don’t as much followers as he does. He quoted, “My followers are really important because I get a lot of likes on my pictures because of them. They are also really important because if it’s a nice picture, I get a lot of likes and if it’s not that nice, I still get a lot of likes.” He also states “I think that the likes define who I am because the more likes, the more people will think I am popular.”

 

The female students believes that the people on social media with many likes and followers feel the need to have a high popularity image and if they don’t they crave the likes and followers. She says “I feel that the people buying their likes are just hungry to get more, especially when they do not get as much as they wished to. And I think that is one of the reasons people are purchasing likes. Another reason they are buying likes is to raise their self esteem.” She also says that without the buying of likes people’s self esteem boosts if they get many likes in general. “For example, when someone gets many likes, they’ll start to think highly of themselves, like, oh I guess I really am pretty. Then this will start to happen more often and soon, complimenting themselves becomes normal and is happening on a regular basis, and I think this is a result to people becoming narcissists”

 

People’s vanity and self image has become more important to them and they begin to think that the whole world revolves around them. People’s self esteems are being raised after noticing their number of likes and followers, and this leads to them thinking very highly of themselves. The social media impacts leads to the growing rate of narcissists.