Selling the beautiful life
Istopped using Instagram earlier this year, on realising that I reliably felt worse after opening it than I did before it. But my account— a locked one with just a couple of hundred followers and posts — is almost exclusively for keeping in touch with people I got to know in other ways.
Still, every time I open the app, I’m presented with an endless feed of my friends and family doing incredible things, having a wonderful time — without me. There’s the friend whose wedding I wasn’t invited to; I found out about it through the app. There’s the friend looking fantastic after every workout. And there’s the friend who lives in New York, apparently over in London for the weekend without telling me.
Meanwhile, I’m doing nothing of note — except sitting on Instagram.
When I tell friends about my dissatisfaction with the app, their responses are mixed. Some cite conventional wisdom, telling me to unfollow the influencers with a commercial imperative to sell me a perfect life and devote the app to keeping up with the friends I care about.
But I don’t follow any influencers and the friends I care about the most are the ones most likely to create the familiar pang of ‘Fomo’ (fear of missing out). Others offer exactly the opposite advice, arguing that my problem is not following enough influencers. I should focus more on using it as a source of information and inspiration, they say.
It’s true that there is a whole world of information best communicated in a visual medium. While some fitness-focused accounts leave you feeling like a fat blob of plasticine, others are sources of useful advice, laser-targeted at people in your situation.
But I’ve tried that version of Instagram, too, and I worry that it provides only a veneer of engagement, while hovering on the precipice of impossibly perfect breakfasts eaten by impossibly perfect-looking people. Even Facebook, which owns Instagram, warns against using its products in this way. “In general,” the company wrote on its corporate blog last year, “when people spend time passively consuming information ... they report feeling worse afterward.”
Of course, Facebook’s answer was that everyone should post more. But it would say that, wouldn’t it?
Instagram provides only a veneer of engagement, while hovering on the precipice of impossibly perfect breakfasts eaten by impossibly perfect-looking people.