Tumblr Culture

Whenever I would try to explain tumblr to my non-tumbling friends, I would always describe it as having multiple cultures. There's the adorable fandoms, that, admittedly, do get a little dramatic. And the hipster culture, the fitness culture, the fashion culture, pretty much anything you can think of. But one that I "tumbled" into was a sort of meshing of thinspo and angst. If you don't know what thinspo is, it stands for "thinsperation" and was created to help girls stick to "diet" plans in order to stay skinny. It basically turned into pictures of sickly girls that make other, healthier girls feel horrible about themselves. I happened upon one of these pictures just now;

which I feel epitomizes my point. It doesn't have any words saying that this is right or what you should be doing or how you should look; but it glorifies despair and loneliness and makes them beautiful and glamourous. This girl is contorted and twisted in on herself, she's extremely thin, and seemingly depressed. I understand that people aren't happy all the time and we are allowed to feel our feelings, but the angst of a situation is constantly perpetuated through this tumblr culture. So when girls and boys come home from their bad days at high school, they get on the computer and the outside world tells them to keep being sad, because being sad and broken and tormented is a goal to be obtained and it makes you interesting and glamorous and different. This same culture is obsessed with people like Kurt Cobain and Marilyn Monroe; people who lived to the extreme, especially when it came to drugs and depression, and died young and tragically. Society has immortalized them and made them into figures to look up to. I find this side of tumblr to be very troubling and destructive. I try to fill my life with things that lift me up and inspire me; not things that give me an excuse to wallow in self-pity when in reality I'm a white upper-middle class college coed who has a loving boyfriend and parents who are paying for college. I understand that I'm lucky, but I wish the side of tumblr that promoted gratefulness and positivity was more popular than it's depression and cliché-quote ridden counterpart. For now, I'm going to unfollow the negative blogs and follow more positive ones. 

Wishing you positivity and a productive, love-filled year!

xxo taylor