THE NEED TO FEEL IMPORTANT

I remember the day I heard of instagram. Some friends were talking about this new app that allowed you upload pictures, view pictures, get followers and loads of other fun stuff. I was so intruiged by it not because I liked taking pictures for people to see, but just because of the way they talked about it. They went on and on about how they had hundreds of followers and how their pictures easily gathered likes over this new app. So I thought, maybe I would do the same and maybe get even more likes and followers. Later that day, I downloaded the app and instantly created a profile. The goal then was simply to get more followers than they had and have my pictures become instant hits! Easy! Oh how naive I was 😂😂😂. 

So I uploaded my first post and after a week, I still had 5 likes! Just 5 likes! I actually just had 4 likes plus my own like on my photo 😂. Meanwhile, my friends were cruising about a hundred likes on every single new post they dropped just within the first 24 hours of the upload! They were like superstars 😎 while I was easily blending into the audience 😢. I remember one day, walking around the reception of my hostel and begging people I didnt even know to follow me on Instagram and like ALL my posts! It's so funny when I think of it now, but then, the struggle was REAL!!! I didn't even stop to think about how stupid I must have looked to them 😂😂😂. I was willing to go any length just to be able to raise my chest whenever I was in the company of those girls and talk about how many likes my photos had on instagram or how many followers I had then, not because having a certain amount of followers meant I'd get paid a million dollars or I'd win a nobel peace prize or something cool like that. I just wanted that because I needed to feel important! 

Do you remember your first tweet 😏? How much you monitored the number of retweets and likes you got? Or your first post on facebook, how you smiled when the alerts for your likes going from 1 to 2 likes after 1 hour? 😆 or when you started your blog and how you kept checking how many views you got every single second 😂😂😂 (ok maybe the last question was more about me than you 😆 but, you get the point). Or maybe you're not much of a social media person. Remember the day you got that question in class and the teacher made everyone stand up to applaud you or how you get a little jealous when that girl/guy always got the math problem right or when you dreamt that you were richer than Bill Gates because you built the new app that everyone wanted 😂😂. Those little moments, the likes, retweets, applause, the dream victories 😆 sure it felt great. The numbers were really fun to watch, sometimes painful, but mostly fun. They were designed to be like that. To keep us coming back.

Why else would you wake up every morning eager to check the status update you uploaded on your Whatsapp status the previous night to see how many views it got overnight 😉All of those systems play on one vital piece of human psychology.

The need to feel important! 

Contrary to popular belief, all these things don't necessarily make us selfish or narcissist or something bad like that, not always at least. They mostly just make us human. But just like everything that makes us human, we could easily turn it into a bad thing 👎or a good thing 👍. It's so easy to do good with it. For example, Imagine if you didn't try to get popular on twitter at another person's expense? Imagine if you didn't use the popularity you had to make another person feel less important. Imagine if you did nice things like support a worthy cause or helped a person in need or helped a friend that just started her blog to spread awareness and get more viewers 😏😆. Ok, ignore the last one, that one was about me again. All I'm saying is, everyone loves feeling important at some point in their lives, trying to pull someone down to bring yourself up might make you feel important but it also makes you a bully 😒👎.

In our quest to satisfy this need for importance, let's not make others feel less important. There's more than enough importance to go around. Feel free to share 😁

So that's what Edna thinks. Feel free to comment about those funny things you've done in the past to feel important 😂 or not. But don't forget to tell your friends about this blog so you can help Edna satisfy her need to be important too 😂😀. You could also tell me about something you want me to talk about in the comment section.

Till next time on Edna speaks, yall have been an awesome audience!

Thanks for reading.