This week, I read Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. It is a very elegant, detailed, and beautiful love story yet meaningful. One of the quotes that I want to focus on today's reflection is about pride and vanity.
“Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.” As Jain Austen wrote, vanity and pride may be used synonymously because they are seemingly similar to each other. The slight difference between the two is whether it focuses on the opinions of ourselves or the comparisons of ourselves to others. Although pride is usually bad and may make someone consider himself or herself better than others, I personally believe that there are more negative consequences of being vain than prideful. Last Friday, I filmed a video about why we should STOP using Instagram stories. Personally, I have stopped posting Instagram stories and have experienced a lot of positive changes in my life. I won't go in depth about the content of the video (which is about the reasons we shouldn't post Insta stories) because that would be a spoiler, but I want to talk about a connection between vanity and one of the disadvantages of Instagram stories. Certainly, there are many benefits of Instagram stories: opening up chances to socialize, less pressure to be instagrammable because it is a story not a POST, etc. However, what I realized my own experiences of posting stories was that it actually makes me stay away from truly enjoying the present moments because I was filled up with thinking about how I present those moments on my stories. Whether it was a happy or upsetting moment, I would immediately think of ways to share my moments with others instead of dealing with those situations in my actual life. Even more, I would have a bad day sometimes, compare myself to others who had seemingly better days (and posted on their stories) because they hung out with their friends or went out to eat delicious foods, and have even worse days as I started comparing myself. What I'm trying to say is that as much as vanity itself is bad and comes from thinking about "what we would have others think of us," the fact that we put ourselves into situations to focus more on what others think of prior than how we think of ourselves can be detrimental. Often times low self-esteem and lack of confidence begin with a comparison. On the other hand, vanity and conceit may also come from comparing oneself to others. It is one of my hopes and goals for my Youtube channel to help others by spreading meaningful messages. However, I found out that it's harder to put more emotional or deeper contents up online where anyone can see because I am also afraid of mean comments, dealing with controversies, and being judged by others. (In fact, I am going to delete the video I filmed on Friday and re-film one about the same content because I think it can always be better as I try more and more.) Nevertheless, I do want to impact other people's perspectives and help those processes as much as I can, and one step for me to improve is to stop comparing myself to others and being genuine to myself and my videos. As cringy as it sounds, this mindset is helping me to be brave and courageous to achieve my goals:)
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