Youth talk

We really do live in the best of times. With Photoshop, filters and social media, we can completely change how the outside world perceives us. Recently, Zilla van der Born, a Dutch national, spent five weeks travelling in Southeast Asia. Except she didn’t.

In fact, Zilla stayed at home and managed to convince everyone around her that she was visiting Buddhist temples and snorkelling in pristine, azure water. How, you may ask? Through the magic of Photoshop. Her snorkelling trip in the middle of the sea was actually a pool in her apartment complex. Her sitting in a Buddhist temple was a manipulated image of her living room. By uploading these images to social media sites, Zilla aimed to ‘prove how easy it is to distort reality’.

And prove she did … along with making a poignant statement on how we regularly alter reality via social media. With filters that remove unsightly blemishes, or even standing a certain way to achieve the holy ‘thigh gap’, we’re all guilty of presenting ourselves in a less-than-true light.

We can’t blame the internet over this, since its human nature to want to be the best version of ourselves. There isn’t a simple fix for but, hopefully, we can at least learn from Zilla’s experiment to alter our perception of our distorted reality.