Trust us, we’ll get over our social media mania

Iwaded towards the sun-kissed glass edge of the infinity pool and looked into the setting Hawaiian sun and inhaled the deep smell of urine. The stench was so strong I might as well be hanging out in a car park stairwell. I was at the hotel because I’d been promised that it was the most Instagrammable pool in Hawaii. So here I was. This was it. Ahhh, the urine-soaked serenity. A used Elastoplast bobbed past me in the wake of a farting middle-aged man’s breaststroke. It was at that moment, as a forlorn forgotten french fry sailed past behind the Elastoplast, that I had my Instagram awakening.

This ’gram business really wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Which seems painfully obvious to the over-30s, but is the big coming-of-age moment for all mid-90s babies like me.

It’s the moment every parent is worried teenagers don’t have. There’s (understandably) a big concern that young people are growing up being manipulated by social feeds, unaware that the always tanned, always toned, always ready-tobust-a-yoga-move images of real life aren’t, well, real. Not only that, but that social media presents overly sexualised or outright dangerous content to young people, such as the widespread concern in the media this week over ‘‘cutting circles’’ in which girls share photos of self-harming.

So it has culminated in a thoroughly modern moral panic. And I get it. Not only is social media use now linked to everything from young people not having sex to our catastrophic anxiety levels. But also, from the outside, it looks as though it’s happening at the worst possible time for those already struggling to make sense of the world.

But I promise parents it’s actually not as bad as it looks. For a start, social media follows the same obsession/repulsion cycle that other hyperrealities follow – just like porn. You start off being infatuated with Instagram and the endless shiny baubles of brunch, beaches and borderline manic smiles that it drapes around life.

It’s new and exciting and overwhelming, and you’ll spend hours scrolling through it thinking of all the new things to try. (Who knew you were that excited about grazing platters?)

But as you get progressively more obsessed, you also realise that it’s progressively less rewarding. It’s actually not that much fun to spend four hours painting your face for the perfect selfie every day. And you also realise that those perfect moments that you see on the ’gram don’t exist in real life. And actually, it’s getting kind of boring talking about grazing platters all the time anyway. It feels like the whole thing has become one giant superficial snark-fest designed to make you feel like you’re an underachiever because you can’t make tapenade.

So you back off, you delete the Facebook app and only scroll through IG stories absent-mindedly while you’re on the loo. Young people, just like their parents, start to self-moderate.

And this is OK. It’s the natural cycle of hyperreality usage, and there’s nothing wrong with letting us go through the bad experiences in order to learn what we do and don’t like. Admittedly it’s a riskier strategy with things like porn, but it still works. At a sexuality conference the other day, I listened to sexual health nurses talk about how boys who used to watch violent, abusive porn at 15 are now coming back at 18 and shrugging, ‘‘Nah, I don’t watch that stuff any more, Miss. It made me feel bad.’’

You’ve just got to trust that young people have enough self-awareness and real life experiences that help expose hyper-reality as the sham that it is. Whether that’s through the epiphany of getting a sodden french fry stuck in your bikini or because you meet a wise old bird who shows you how the real world is, young fledgling.

The beauty of this is that, once you’ve been through this realisation, it inoculates you against the depressing facts of what social media really is. We know it’s largely just a vast, boring, shallow void of people howling in endless narcissism, insecurity and vanity. You know it’s going to make you feel bad, like reading a woman’s mag or spending time with your cousin Susan who’s forever one-upping your stories.

So you learn to just nibble on bits that make you feel good, posts on body positivity or baby otters, all the while ignoring Susan’s snaps of her new lounge with its multitude of unnecessary pillows.

And yes, it’s rather depressing to realise one of humanity’s favourite pastimes is bragging about lounge suites. But in some ways, young people are at the perfect time in their lives to realise this. We’re already realising the truth about love, friendship, and the importance of writing down your IRD login details and nailing it to the wall. We can take this in our stride.