Great job guys, we ruined Father's Day

OPINION: Father's Day has become nothing more than an excuse to post a cute baby picture of ourselves on Instagram. Why has the day about our dads become a day about us?

#fathersday as told by Instagram. Ugh.

GENERATION Y, we've done it again.

We cop a lot of unfair criticism from the older generations but yesterday we proved that "self-centredness" is a fair accusation.

We managed to turn a day that is supposed to be about telling our fathers how great they are into a day about ourselves.

I'm talking about Facebook and Instagram and the roundabout way in which we used them to wish our dads a happy Father's Day.

The weirdest thing I witnessed was an acquaintance of mine who posted a heartfelt message addressed to her dad on Facebook. She's not even Facebook friends with her dad.

What was the point?

I really have no idea.

Others who are at least Facebook friends with their dads also posted "Happy Father's Day" status updates and tagged their fathers. But still, on some level they were doing this to show pony in front of all their other Facebook friends. Otherwise, why didn't they just tell their dad face-to-face?

Instagram was worse. Father's Day seems to have become the perfect excuse to post an adorable baby picture of yourself with your dad. I'm pretty sure our fathers get no sense of how much we love them from the pictures we post on our Instagram accounts. My dad doesn't even know what Instagram is.

And the message implied by those pictures is more "look how cute I was as a baby!" than "love you dad!"

Searching the #fathersday hashtag on Instagram brings up a bunch of selfies with fathers, old baby pictures with fathers, and a whole lot of pictures that don't even have a dad in them.

We each carefully curate our Facebook and Instagram accounts to give people the impression we live our lives a certain way (mostly in a way that is "awesome" and involves lots of sunsets and coffees).

So why else did people post Father's Day messages on their various accounts if not to show off?

Of course, Father's Day is a bit of a ridiculous marketing exercise in itself, mostly used to drive up sales at Bunnings and JB Hi-Fi.

But the more insidious marketing going on yesterday was the marketing we did of ourselves on social media, under the guise of wanting to tell our dads we love them.

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