I welcome you to my blog and another wonderful edition of the Hive Learners' featured post. There is this famous saying from when I was younger, "Fake it until you make it," but then only a few people were actually living by this saying, and we did not see anything wrong with it, but in our world today, more than half the population is living by that saying. Nobody has really made it, but if you go on social media or hear people talk, you will be forced to feel like you are not doing good or doing enough, and if you succumb to the pressure, you will end up losing your happiness and even start cursing yourself and wondering where your problems are coming from and why you are not doing well like your mates or your friends.
Sometimes letting the lifestyles of people around you and on social media put pressure on you is a very big mistake. Sometimes you see people's lifestyles around you and online, and then you conclude they are doing better than you and you need to do better and they have gone ahead of you, but you will never know that you are actually doing way better than them and they are just faking it and making you feel like they have it all figured out when they are not even close to figuring anything out. Most of the time we conclude with the flashy lifestyles online, but behind closed doors, those people you feel have things figured have a messier life than you do, but they have used a fake lifestyle to cover all of that up.
Is faking a lifestyle or life itself hurting people? Yes, definitely, it is hurting people; today many people are suicidal because of the fake lifestyle many people are putting up in our world today. A world where at least 80% of the lifestyles that we see are not authentic and not actually real and have no roots to them puts pressure on a lot of people, and they start beating themselves up and wanting to meet up, and if they cannot meet up, they start to slip into depression and in no time lose themselves and are no longer the happy individual they used to be and from there proceed to becoming suicidal without knowing that the lifestyle that is putting that much pressure on them was all fake.
I had a coursemate back then when I was in school; if you hear this guy talk, you will question your existence. He tells you how he bought land, how he has rented an apartment in Port Harcourt, how the apartment he lives in currently and is coming to school from costs over 2 million naira in rent a year, and how he is building his own house where he will give it out for rent in Umuahia. He says these and many more things, and there are us who are coursemates and even age mates with no land, living self-contained, and don't even have the money for an apartment.
This guy says things like this, and many more, over and over again, and sometimes I go home asking myself questions: Why is my own different? Am I even doing enough? I am always engulfed by sadness whenever he starts talking, but somehow we got to know someone who knows him very well from home, and that person told us that is his way and that all he had claimed to have achieved, he was not anywhere near. We argued, and the guy took us to his family house in a village not quite far from school, and it's even trekkable. We barged into the compound, and our big boy was sitting outside shirtless.
All this while he claimed to be living in an apartment, he was actually coming to school from his father's house and living in a compound where the bathroom toilet was shared by everyone living in the compound. It was that day that I cautioned myself: not every lifestyle and word said to you or online should be taken to heart; many who you think have their lives figured out don't even know what they are doing. As much as seeing those things can hurt, you can choose to stop letting them get to you.
