The internet changes people from what I have noticed and experienced myself. I have changed in negative ways. Social media, in particular, allows anyone to post anything they want as long as they have internet access. I believe this connection can have both positive and negative impacts on the posters and viewers. The way one acts on social media can show a lot about a person, specifically what seven deadly sin they are. The seven deadly sins represent failure in spiritual progression, more specifically in pride, envy, gluttony, lust, wrath, greed and sloth.  

Pride goes by many names: the horse sin, the lion sin, the peacock sin or the violet sin. Most people know that pride can be described as boasting and grandstanding. It is that moment when something happens to you and you are filled with the desire for the world or a group of people to know of your accomplishments, or vanity. The need to constantly brag or boast of one’s accomplishments comes from seeing how great others are and then feeling invisible for the lack of accomplishment you receive. The internet shows us how great others are constantly and makes people feel less worthy. In order to compensate, people feel the need to show the world how great they are, how much fun they are having, how many more friends (followers) they have, and how many more likes they get on a photo.

The dog sin, Envy, is a green-eyed monster inside everyone, the monster constantly desires more. The monsters want their clothes, their shoes, their body, their money, their relations and their power. Often times we give the monster more and more power with every block, stalk, comment and like. We see those with so much more than us constantly posting on the internet, the green monster upset and thinks we need improvement. The green-eyed monster makes us feel as though we are entitled to things just because they see constantly how others have something. We treat it like a teacher because it teaches us what we want more and more. It teaches us that we deserve more than we have.

The blue snake itself, Lust, craves the pleasures of the body. Online lust runs rampant; people see it in all shapes and sizes. Almost everyone wants to look their best online and show off their white teeth, nice hair and attractive partner. People are able to post pictures of them with their significant other as a way of saying, “Hey look how attractive my date is.”  It is a more accessible way to publicly show of one’s conquests and choose a new conquest because the internet connects us all.

The red bear sin, Wrath, can be defined as panic and anxiety. We see it when someone posts something we dislike: The power of being anonymous overcomes us and the anger comes out without guilt. The power comes from being terrified–terrified that people who we dislike or things we dislike will have power over us unless we tear them down first. The feeling of tearing down others builds us up, we feel the power of being anonymous and often abuse it. People flock to media where they can give and receive these messages. This makes me think that the power of being anonymous is addictive.

Gluttony, the orange sow, can be defined as eating more than we need caused by lack of self control.  One form of our little sow gluttony is shown by how much we allow social media to eat up our time. We are constantly eating up our data by constantly refreshing the page, continuously clicking for no reason and rotating media outlets.  I believe it is because we are emotionally starving for connection. We go through the social media posts because we feel lonely and like posts are a temporary fix for the lonely ones. When we see others hanging out in groups, we feel lonely.

The light blue goat Sloth shows laziness, which comes from the physiological fear of being mocked and failing, so the only desire we have is to do nothing. Online, we see success and we see failure constantly, often our brains will compare ourselves to the people of the internet. When we see the successes and failures of others, we often become discouraged to try new things by thinking to ourselves that it’s too hard. Because we are too afraid of the failure, we often do things last minute because we all know that if we fail we can say, “Oh I just threw that together an hour ago. I don’t really care if I fail.”  If we succeed, we get the glory of saying, “Oh I just threw that together an hour ago,” expecting people to praise you for how well you did in such a short time.

Greed is the need to have more than others, and it is represented by the yellow frog. We all have the need for more. More likes. More followers. More posts. Many times we are able to see how much rich people live, and this creates a desire to have more and more until we can not handle it. This leads people to look down on those who do not have as many followers or likes as they do. Some see likes and followers as a competition. Daring people will become desperate and do things like take dares and post risky things in order to gain more followers or likes. I think that in some ways our interactions with social media could be categorized as one of the seven deadly sins. These sins do not make us bad people, they make us who we are. They show us how we can be better people online and off. Pride can tell us that we need to be humble online and not get upset if we don’t get as many likes as we had hoped. Envy makes us feel entitled to more than we deserve like being because we want the stuff others have and then expect for the same thing to happen to us. Lust can be shown as the desire to show off your physical features online.  Wrath’s power comes from being able to confront insult their fears in a indirect way. Gluttony eats away our time constantly with every new post consuming you a little more. Sloth comes from the fear of failure because both success and failures have been posted for the world to see. The question is “What side of it will you be on?” Greed is the need, the need for more than others.

The seven deadly sins will always be within us, but it has chosen to take up a new media, the internet.