Despite all the claims to the contrary, maybe social media isn’t all that bad. Consider this new trend.
Consistent daily motivation can be hard to come by, but having a community to support your progress can make an incredible difference and inspire us to reach our goals. A recent social media trend has created a similar environment, incentivizing personal challenges — the followers they receive.
During the COVID-19 Pandemic, I challenged myself to draw every day for 100 days. I wanted to improve my anatomical knowledge, technical skills and artistic prowess, so I set myself the goal of drawing every day until I hit 100. I decided to create an art account on Instagram to post my drawings online as a way of documenting my progress. As I kept posting new drawings, my account began gaining followers and a more-or-less consistent viewership. On day 15 of drawing and posting on my art account, I had gained a little over 50 followers. Although most were admittedly friends and family, I felt like I couldn’t let them down by quitting my new daily task.
With every post, I received encouragement in the form of likes and comments, and what was initially a way of recording my progress became a source of motivation to continue and eventually finish the 100-day challenge. By posting consistently and diligently, I naturally gained a small following and consequently improved my level of motivation to follow through with my goal. My supporters held me accountable (either directly or indirectly) to persevere through days when I had no energy.When I successfully finished those 100 days, I found myself feeling compelled to keep going and further my artistic development, so I promptly started another 100-day challenge.
Committing to fulfilling a long-term goal and changing your daily routine can be a mentally and physically demanding endeavor; but I learned that with support, it becomes easier to find motivation and complete that goal. Similar to my drawing challenges, this kind of online-sourced motivation has now gained traction as a trend on social media. More and more people are starting personal challenges, needing external accountability to stay consistent with their daily activities of choice. They consequently turn to building a following, a community that supports them on their journey, and the Instagram and TikTok algorithms have helped many to do so.
The idea is simple: with every new follower, the person will complete the equivalent added measurement of whatever they’ve set out to complete that day, so not only does the person doing the challenge build a community, but that community will, in turn, encourage the person to continue to post their progress every day.
Many people who see these videos assume that the account creating the videos is simply “farming” followers, or posting for the sole purpose of gaining the online social status that comes with a large following. Though some of these accounts are indeed follower-farms, this trend contributes to the positive side of the internet, encouraging people to push themselves and step beyond their comfort-zone. Searching through Instagram, most of the accounts partaking in the trend were focused on increasing their daily exercise measure, improving their physical and mental health , and by posting online and inspiring others to do so, too.Whether it be by doing push-ups, running, weight-lifting or even just walking, the constant accumulation of followers each day made the participants accumulate their daily activity.
Some of examples I found show them committing to “Bench-pressing 1 Gram of Rice For Every Follower”, “Doing One Push-up For Every Follower I get”, “Walking 3 Feet For Every Follower I Get”, “Running 10 Centimeters For Every New Follower I Get”, “Doing 1 Pull-up For Every 25 followers I Get” and even one ambitious pledge to spend “1 More Second In The Ice Bath For Every 500 Followers, 1 Push-up For Every 1000 Followers, 1 Pull-up For Every 2500 Followers, 1 Jumprope For Every 200 Followers AND 1 Extra Second Planking For Every 500 Followers.”
By day 15, the guy adding a gram of rice to his daily bench press had gained 55 thousand followers, and many others received similar numbers in a short amount of time. In contrast to my 50 followers back in 2020, one can see how much the algorithm has developed a positive appreciation for that kind of content.
Upon surface-level viewing, people gaining followers may not appear to have any particular significance in the grand scheme of things; however, by stepping back and looking at the full story of the matter, one can see a positive side-effect to this trend: a contribution to the greater movement of encouraging self-improvement. In the past decade, I’ve noted a remarkable proliferation of gym accounts gaining hundreds of thousands of followers, inspiring community members and the people sharing their progress to continue to work out and improve their physique and overall health. Evidently, building a community introduces a range of benefits, including a sense of belonging and a support system for both the followers and the account followed. With these challenges, the community can inspire everyone involved to participate in self-actualization.
Despite the negative connotations associated with social media, one thing is clear: by sharing our own progress stories, we can further inspire ourselves and others, and prove that there is indeed a good side to the internet.
