Did you have a chance to drift on a yacht off the coast of Ibiza with a rotating cast of guests that included Anne Hathaway, Olivia Palermo and a handful of male models? No?
Then you need to become friends with Valentino Garavani, who, as shown in photos organized under the Instagram hashtag #tmblue2015, has dedicated himself to a life of maritime leisure, replete with photogenic and oft-photographed pals, a cheeky dog named Poppy and casually elegant clothes that seem straight out of a fall editorial.
Maybe you were busy attending concerts in Britain with a couple of supermodels and an international pop star? No?
Then it’s probably time for you to send in your application to join Taylor Swift’s high-profile girl gang. Members of the squad, which includes Cara Delevingne, Karlie Kloss, Kendall Jenner, Gigi Hadid and Martha Hunt, organized a short concert tour in June, hopping between music performances in London and the Glastonbury Music Festival via helicopter.
Is all this bringing out the envious side of you? You’re not alone. The fear of missing out, which has spawned the #FOMO hashtag, has for years been identified as a prime side effect for the millions of people who have Instagram, Facebook, Twitter or Snapchat accounts.
Yet the condition seems sharper and more pronounced in summer, when various combinations of celebrities join forces, escape to shimmering sunshine-soaked locales and document their escapades on social platforms. It’s hard to ignore the underlying message: They’re having a fabulous summer while you, poor soul trapped in a grim cubicle, are not.
“Not only am I not on this epic trip in Cannes but I’m also not on this yacht in Cannes with Gigi and Bella Hadid and Hailey Baldwin,” said Emily Tess Katz, 25, a Huffington Post associate editor. “It exacerbates the feeling. I can’t help but have the delusion that they would enjoy me there.”
The extent to which the subjects of summer’s most enviable photos are actually enjoying themselves is difficult to gauge. But on platforms like Instagram, the point is rarely to depict reality. Filters soften harsh lighting and captions hint (often vaguely) at fun that can’t be captured in words.
A study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General in February measured the emotional effects of Facebook use, finding that passively using the platform (scrolling through your feed and looking at people’s posts the way you would on Instagram) enhances envy, which in turn makes people feel worse overall.
Ethan Kross, 35, a researcher on the study and an associate professor and director at the Emotion and Self-Control Laboratory at the University of Michigan, said: “There’s a tendency to curate the way we appear online. Constantly seeing all these positive developments in people’s lives is not necessarily good for one’s emotional well-being.”
But it’s not all bad. Maureen Dahl, 22, of Saratoga, New York, a client-services technician, experienced deep vacation envy this summer after she was hit by a car in May and all her planned trips were derailed. Dahl suffered a fractured femur, tibia and pelvis and a torn meniscus. It was six weeks before she was able to move around on her own using crutches and three months before she could drive again.
Dahl, who this summer has been checking Instagram 15 to 20 times a day and follows the Kardashians, explained the upside of seeing all the trips showing up on her feed: “It’s definitely motivated me to get better....”
She found ways to capture the excitement she sees in the virtual world by spending time in Saratoga or heading to its race track. Her instincts reflect a finding of the Facebook study and one other that has been linked to it. “What we find is that interacting with other people directly, face-toface or talking to someone on the phone, has the exact opposite effect on how people feel,” Kross said. “It’s an improvement of well-being.”
The cure for Instagram-induced vacation envy, it seems, is a return to pleasures IRL (In Real Life).