Welcome to Seltzer Squad, the podcast about staying sober in the city with your host, Kate Sander and Jess Valentine.

Hey, Kate. Hi, Jess.

I want to talk about social media.

Yep. Let's do it. Let's go through the ups and the downs and the fucking all around.

Sure. So the first social media I ever remember having was Friendster and then MySpace and then Facebook and then Instagram.

And I feel like everything is on Instagram.

Yeah.

Kids like today, they never had life without it.

I know.

And it's crazy because I feel like the expectations of everything are just so much higher because we put our best face forward no matter how fucking filtered and fake it could be.

Sure.

So we always have these unattainable goals and set these high standards to ourselves.

And the truth of the matter is very different,

you know, than what we put on social. And it's like those when you see celebrities without makeup.

Yeah. You know what I mean? And you're like, oh, that's horrifying. No, they're just real people. Exactly. And people are so fucking mean to one another. When you have like a screen behind, you know, you just hide behind your screen and you write these horrible nasty things. I mean, look at people like get online bullied and like kill themselves and so forth. I mean, I work in social media a lot of my, I mean, I shoot social media photography for clients. So I am in the business of making things look better online. And I've thought a lot about this because I too, like, I call it getting the jellies. When I get the jellies of too many people in social media, it starts to make me feel bad about myself. Sure. I compare myself to them and I start to feel less than. So something

that I came up with, you know, recently is that like if you put it down, the internet can't hurt you.

Like I thought that I had to post on social media every single day to be relevant, to be in

business, to get clients. And that simply wasn't always the case. Like, sure, you know, people go to your social media to

validate you that you're like a human being and that you're like not a robot, although you could

be a robot if you have a, you know what I mean on social media. But like it was getting to the

point where I was just comparing myself and looking at how quote unquote far ahead

everybody else was, making myself feel like I needed to do all of these things all of the time

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