In all my long years of life, I’ve determined that the three most important things to having a successful high school career are: 1. Good grades. 2. Friends. 3. How many likes I have on my Instagram post. And how many people favorited my tweet. Did a sufficient number of people like my Facebook profile picture? If you started reading this because you wanted advice on high school, well then here it is: social media is awesome, until you get social media anxiety. All the time.

I joined the 21st century a few weeks ago and signed up for Twitter. I casually followed some school friends, and even some people that weren’t my friends. And then I did something I thought I would never do. I tweeted. For the longest time, I thought Twitter was for celebrities. For beautiful people to write their beautiful words and have their million followers read them. I soon realized that those million followers are about as average as me, and if they have Twitters, I might as well too. That’s where it all started.

The anxiety is the worst. You type out a 140 character sentence, and get a slight heart attack when you press “Tweet.” Five minutes pass. You keep rereading it and think, “Maybe it wasn’t that funny. Or maybe no one is online. Yeah, that’s probably it.” Ten minutes pass. You refresh the app. Nothing, until you get a notification: “@yourfriend favorited your tweet!” Sure, it might be the same friend that favorites all of your tweets, but that’s what best friends are for: boosting your self-esteem on the Twitter.

As heart-attack inducing as Twitter is, it is nothing compared to Instagram. It’s as if all the pretty people in the world got together one day and said, “Where can we shamelessly post our selfies and judge each other?” And so Instagram was born. Those pretty people became InstaFamous, and average folks like me are stuck posting pictures of family vacations at Disney.

But I don’t mind. Who cares? Even if you don’t have a Twitter or an Instagram, there’s always Facebook, which is a combination of both of these. Thank you Mark Zuckerberg for creating a platform for me to never post anything, but still silently stalk my friends. Chances are, if you’re on my friends list, I’ve looked through all of your profile pictures, the photos you’ve been tagged in and I even saw the pictures from middle school of you with braces. You were so adorable. No matter how adorable you were, however, that picture means nothing unless it has at least 20 likes.

The thing about social media is that while every like or favorite we get gives us a burst of happiness, each one that we don’t sends our self-esteem spiraling downward. It’s a sick game, but I live for it. As do millions of other people. So about that high-school-advice: make your accounts, but you’ve been warned.