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Behind the illusion of heart shaped lenses

Esha Agarwal, Grade 11

‘’It is ordinary to love the beautiful but beautiful to love the ordinary.’’

In an era of perpetual scrolling, this truth is increasingly forgotten. Romanticizing life online has been described by the Oxford Dictionary as treating something in an idealized, unrealistic manner. This has transformed how we perceive reality. Cherished, simple moments are now curated, filtered, and turned into tokens for validation. When we photograph a moment, it becomes a token for an experience- providing that occasion with value and the importance of being archived. Today, we live in an age of visual reality, leading lives in an online space that was created to mimic our real life connections and facilitate deeper interaction. However, through digital media, it is not appreciated but rather romanticized, appearing more alluring than original, authentic beauty and becoming an addictive escape from the seemingly drab reality, replacing real world connection. 

With the proliferation of digital devices, our minds have become accustomed to overexposure of multiple stimuli, often those prioritizing sensationalism over contemplation of the everyday, and recognizing beauty in real life. Even though – or because- we have greater exposure and access to a larger variety to everyday beauty online, we are losing connection with real life beauty in our world, which can be perceived and felt truly and is biologically necessary. The necessity of recognizing this beauty to give rise to creativity is deeply interspersed into the nature of our society, culture and beliefs. 

This allure stems from hedonism, the pursuit of fleeting pleasure, which is amplified online. Social media offers an endless stream of moments shaped to evoke envy and aspiration, often drawn from Eurocentric ideals of beauty, luxury, and leisure. This fosters discontentment by advertising a falsely narrated version of life—one edited for perfection and disconnected from realism, creating inadequacy as we compare our unscripted lives to these portrayals.

Ironically, this disconnect grows even as we seek connection. Humans are biologically wired to crave multi-sensory experiences—touch, sound, smell—yet visual manifestations online engage only one sense. This limited engagement dulls our appreciation for the full spectrum of real-world beauty- the textures, aromas and reverberations that tie us to the moment. These are moments that, though ordinary, nurture creativity and ground us in our shared human experience.

Romanticizing life online not only distances us from these moments but also blinds us to the beauty embedded in our cultural and societal fabric. Our overexposure to sensationalism reduces our ability to contemplate and cherish the everyday. It is important that we recognize the false façade of glossy perfectionism for what it is and embrace the authentic, the messy, the real instead.

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