Living a Double Life Fueled by Social Media

Living a Double Life Fueled by Social Media Student’s Name Institutional Affiliation Living a Double Life Fueled by Social Media Wilde Oscar’s The Importance of Being Earnest depicts myriad social issues that were prevalent during the nineteenth century. The most outstanding of these issues include adopting false identities, class and social distinctions, identity and language, and gender roles. Despite the scenes portraying lives of people over two centuries ago, these themes resonate with the lives of people in our current society. Critical to this discussion is the assumption of false identities that different characters in Wilde Oscar’s The Importance of Being Earnest adopt, including Jack, Algernon, and Cecily. The twenty-first century is not different regarding the issue of false identities, especially with the proliferation of social networks that makes the entire endeavor seemingly easy to achieve. Different people within society seamlessly adopt false identities using social network platforms, which beg the question: what do people derive by living double lives fueled by social media? While social media promotes the proliferation of double identities, underlying social issues portray different dimensions in our society that favor quick fixes through social media. Social networks constitute revolutionary tools that have contributed to immense disruptions in various industries while creating opportunities for countless others. Nonetheless, the visual realities created by social media has continued to mount insurmountable amount of stress and pressure on the lives of social media users to keep up with the magnificent lives of other users. However, unbeknownst to them, more than half of the social media users lead double lives marked by false identities. Wilde Oscar’s play The Importance of Being Earnest highlights the false lives of different characters, including Jack, Algernon, and Cecily, who are on a mission to achieve their goals using their false identities. This revelation is not surprising given that society has carried along with the behavior to the twenty-first century. In a detailed reported given by Scarfo and Zeidler ( 2018), a whopping 28 percent of American millennials admit to deliberately pretend to look wealthier on social media, creating the false identity of themselves whereas the situation of their personal lives looks dire. The increasing trend reflects on the pressure that society continues to pile on people, who in return, circumvent by assuming false identities to create an admirable reputation for the public to see. While adopting false identities may seem like a quick solution to concede to the pressures of the society, more dangers lurk in the realities of the financial lives of social media users. Scarfo and Zeidler (2018), note that money is the main motivation for people who lead double lives depicting themselves as wealthy. Nevertheless, issues of personal finance are a great challenge to the majority of Americans who struggle to keep up in their public image while struggling in their personal lives. For instance, it is worrying to note that nearly 50 percent of Americans cannot handle a $400 cash emergency without borrowing cash to take care of the emergencies (Scarfo and Zeidler, 2018). T...