Entering “selfies” into Google Trends, a program made to track the amount of searches for a term, yields one result in March of 2012. The chart reaches its peak with 100 results in January of 2013. Since then, the results have fluctuated from 80 to 90. Google seems to think that selfies are rising in popularity.

Selfies may seem like a hip new trend among the youth of the world, like bell-bottom jeans and windbreakers, but there’s just one issue: selfies aren’t some new fad.

Selfies aren’t something invented during the rise of personal cameras and smartphones. They’re just a new name for an old concept. A selfie is nothing more than a self portrait, and self portraits aren’t new. Just because it’s easier to take a picture of yourself doesn’t change the fact that people have been creating representations of themselves for centuries.

I can get my phone, take a picture and post it to Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. It’d take less than a minute for me to produce content and put it out there for people to see and “like” or “favorite.” It wasn’t that easy for an artist to put his work out there. There are at least 36 surviving self-portraits of Vincent van Gogh. He had sit at an easel and paint, for hours on end, over the course of several months.

Let’s say it took van Gogh three months to make one self-portrait. It takes me a minute to post a selfie to Instagram. There are roughly 43,800 minutes in a month. If I posted a selfie every minute, then at the end of three months I would have posted 131,400 in the time it took him to complete one self-portrait.

The thing is, I’ve got a considerably easier life than van Gogh had. He suffered with alcoholism, severe anxiety and mental illness. He didn’t continuously paint. He took breaks and let his work sit. He did things at his leisure. Even then, people didn’t appreciate his work.

According to The Art Story, van Gogh’s career lasted from 1880 to his death in 1890. In that ten year period, he made roughly 900 paintings and 1,100 drawings. In his ten-year career, he sold 1 painting to a family member. People didn’t care. He became famous posthumously. People only started caring about his work after he died. Now, where am I going with this?

Let me ask a question: do you care about selfies? Probably not. Did people care about van Gogh’s “selfies?” No. Did people call van Gogh a narcissist because he painted 35 pictures of himself? If you ask me, sitting for three months to paint yourself seems more narcissistic than taking a one-minute selfie. And he painted at least 36. That’s 108 months of painting. Wowzers.

Let’s take a second and ignore that people have been making self-portraits for literally centuries. Ignore the genre of self-portraits, and the icons like Frida Kahlo who painted several self portraits. Let’s look back at the major problem people have with selfies.

People say selfies show conceit and narcissism. People who post selfies are the devil incarnate, and social media like Instagram and Snapchat are Satan’s hands curling around the neck of today’s youth. Submitting your image to Facebook is the equivalent of selling your soul. A modern day Tom Walker would have snapchatted Old Scratch.

The thing is, it isn’t your problem if someone posts 12 selfies an hour. The fact that Sally Cheerleader or Chad Quarterback posts pictures at the beach or at the gym doesn’t concern you. If you don’t want to see them, don’t. Unfollow Chad on Twitter. Unfriend him on Facebook. Delete Sally from Snapchat, and block her on Instagram.

It doesn’t matter if selfies are stupid or not because if it isn’t your selfie, it isn’t your problem. When you have a kid and they post selfies you can start worrying. Until then, give selfie-takers a break. You’ve probably taken at least one selfie in your life, so stop complaining.