Finding trivial respite on Instagram
Discovering something new about yourself is a rare thrill in your 30s, at least for those of us who spend a lot of time thinking about ourselves, even when it has to do with your socialmedia life.
My revelation came in the form of CC, short for Carissa, a good-natured interior designer and mom of three from Tulsa, Okla., who I follow on Instagram. CC is the new version of a public figure, with almost 60,000 Instagram followers, a website and an online shop.
CC is married to her high school sweetheart, who she calls by his full name, Mike Miller. They design and build and flip houses together, but I’m unclear on details. They seem to like each other and have fun together and I’d bet that they’re genuinely happy.
The Millers just got a second dog. CC seems to shop constantly, daily, and posts about sales (“sells,” in her accent) on clothes from places like Target (the Target content is endless), Walmart and Aerie. The Millers spend a lot of time going to kids’ baseball games and cleaning and hanging out and seem to have the kinds of social lives common to people who got married and had kids young and live in places like Tulsa.
I love watching CC’s Instagram stories, not because they’re giving me something, but because they’re not: there’s nothing I want to buy, or copy, or even really know more about. She does seem very nice, but I’m no more invested in her than I am in basically any well-meaning stranger. It is, for me, the definition of white noise. It evokes nothing. The account is maybe my only mental and emotional “break” on Instagram, a platform intended to stir something with every post: desire, envy, judgment.
Until I found CC and realized I was happy whenever one of her stores drifted through my feed — where I spend, despite digitally detoxing every other part of my online life, entirely too much time — I didn’t know that a neutral, nothing moment was something I even wanted.
Let’s call it a Fulfilment Follow. It’s different from the existing Familiar Follows, which are friends and colleagues or Aspirational Follows (Rihanna), or hot people posting (Rihanna), or follows that are useful in some real or timewaster way (so many holistic nutritionists; so many housewives fan accounts), or just fun to watch (dogs), or intended to remind me to look something up, or buy something, like every new brand of all-natural deodorant that pops up.
A Fulfilment Follow is a regular, average stranger who is interesting because they’re not, really. They provide some vague entertainment with no stakes, a place on the platform that has become essential as the online experience is evermore dazzling and depleting. A Fulfilment Follow is a reminiscent of the instant message system ICQ (its “uh oh!” notification sound is nostalgically intense for older millennials), Chatroulette and pre-Reddit message boards, anywhere that strangers were online together, unmediated and without sharing interests or purpose, but just because they could be.
Still, a Fulfilment Follow has to come from somewhere: I’ve probably come across hundreds of similar potential follows that I haven’t taken to like I have with CC. It’s important that their normalcy is perfectly calibrated, a version that’s different from my own, so I have nothing to judge it against, but not so boring that I’m inclined to skip it. My interest in CC dovetails with my interest in home design, and that’s probably how I found her, but not really, because our tastes diverge sharply.
My uninterested interest also sort of reminds me of my enduring obsession with Normal Girls, the kinds of women who have always seemed to me so simple, so predictable, so clean, so happy to burrow into the soft promises of basicness, but CC isn’t like that. She’s ambitious, she’s creative, she’s emotional. The closest proxy I can think of is that she’s like one of my sisters’ friends who I met once or twice and seems fine. Just, fine. And something that seems fine and offers a soothing low hum of content, is what a lot of us are missing.
Twitter: @KateCarraway