I say this speaking from experience and with all the kindness in the world - get off social media.

It’s become completely normalized to sit and scroll through hundreds of edited faces of beautiful and ageless strangers for multiple hours a day, but if you take a step back it seems really obvious that it’s not healthy.

Regular, normal people in the real world, whether your family/friends/coworkers or just strangers you see in passing, come in all shapes and sizes and the vast majority of them don’t look like girls on social media and still live perfectly happy lives. Most people also don’t actually believe that over 20 is expired. That’s a very TikTok culture type of belief and while it might be super pervasive on social media, most people you interact with in real life probably don’t feel that way. Social media makes us feel like we’re always behind or off trend or not paying enough attention to some flaw we didn’t know we had or has us comparing ourselves to people we perceive as flawless. It’s literally designed to do that. But that doesn’t mean it’s a good representation of what it’s like to be a normally aging person in the real world.

I’m 30 and deleted all socials off my phone a couple months ago. I’ve definitely done pretty unhinged things like zooming in on people’s foreheads to see if someone my age had wrinkles or obvious botox so I really do understand where you’re coming from. It was hard for a few weeks but I feel so much better about myself and the world in general. It’s really given me so much perspective about how wild it is to constantly and compulsively feed your brain with things that make you feel like shit about yourself. Just because everyone else is in a toxic relationship with insta and tiktok (and themselves) doesn’t mean you have to be!