Lots of us seem to be very obsessed with how we look, the picture needs to be from an optimal angle, with optimal lighting and of course an optimal smile. We aren’t perfect, something which we confront ourselves with daily and we know others aren’t perfect as well, something we also confront on the daily.
But yet, when it comes to showing yourself to others, it suddenly needs to be perfect, like we don’t know that the outside person looking at the picture isn’t as imperfect as we are.
Perhaps we can ask ourselves, why, why do we do this? Is it just for aesthetic reasons? Do we just want our hair to sit in that exact right spot or to wear our tie in that perfect knot, a knot not too showy, but one that still communicates that you mean business.
What is it exactly what we try to communicate? What do people actually hope to achieve when posting their healthy daily routine and vibrant social life on Instagram? What’s the purpose?
Me personally, I often find that there’s a lack of honesty when people do this, they often try to impress people that they don’t even like or even know. Paradoxically with the people they do like they will play it down. They share the filter they used to make the picture look better or even the brand new AI tool to make their teeth look better. This is just because you would never share a ‘perfect’ photo of yourself with somebody you actually like, somebody who actually knows you I mean.
They know who you really are, they know that the picture was posed in a certain manner and the smile was practiced with a ‘10 tips for a perfect smile’ Youtube video, posing for them as some perfect person on a perfect holiday with perfect friends would be embarrassing.
The reason why it would be embarrassing, in my view, is because it is disingenuous. You’re showing to every person on the internet a perfectly edited version of yourself, sharing the perfect parts of your vacation, the perfect parts of your job, of your family and so on. Like it’s normal that everything is perfect, to a real person you would never have to show yourself in such a manner. Often in real life people emphasis a certain modesty when sharing about their lives, but on these platforms it’s the complete opposite. Farewell holistic view of other people.
Of course, you can’t really blame the individual people in this, if all your friends, colleagues and their dogs do it, why wouldn’t you do it too? You go on nice vacations too right? Often when seeing these posts of your close friends, you kinda know what happens behind the scenes, you take it with a grain of salt, at the end of the day it’s just a snapshot of their lives right? But with people you don’t know personally, that’s all you have, pictures of perfect holidays with perfect girlfriends, for all you know that is their actual life, even though you would never be so stupid to think that about your best friend’s pictures.
The point I’m trying to make here is that somebody else’s pictures give you an unrealistically high view of other’s life, which inevitably worsens the way you think about your life and as a result you want to show yourself too in this manner, which leads others to get a delusional view about your life too and so the cycle reinforces itself. A positive feedback loop.
How can we break free from this? From these performative life-sucking apps? Isn’t it much more freeing to go on vacation without being able to put it on your Instagram, your social CV?
There is another hidden pain from publicly sharing how happy you are: you need to keep it up. Unconsciously although many people consciously plan activities just to show it, post it, etcetera, they become a slave to their own perfect persona. Keeping up with the Joneses is not only tiring, but it’s also extremely inauthentic and shallow. It makes you a product of your Instagram feed.
This is why I believe we would all be better off by just quitting Instagram as a whole, the platform, together with Tiktok is a disease of our time. Only when giving it up, when you aren’t force feeding yourself other people’s highlights, only then you can truly start living for yourself again, without living in an algorithmic prison.
So let’s hope that people listen, that people let go and that their internal forces will start to speak louder again: curiosity, passion, wonder. Let’s hope that with time the fragile, anxiety and misery inducing, external drives resulting from these apps can gradually be replaced by the more personal and human ones, the ones which make you actually want to get out of bed in the morning.
I agree. I believe it's true that the most unhappy people post the most about their lives. Always looking for attention or for a "like". I stay off social media. I don't care to prove anything or have anyone else know what is going on in my life. I don't feel the need to do this and I'm happy that I'm not a slave to social media.
I’m struck by the idea that familiarity makes us stop seeing things and people. Sometimes what we need isn’t a different life, but a less accustomed way of looking.