The prettier your online life, the uglier your real one

Idrive Bentleys, Rolls-royces and Aston Martins for Vogue, and I am told I should have an Instagram account to show them off. But I don’t. I prefer to show them off in person, by driving very slowly through supermarket car parks, accepting the double thumbs-up from strange men.

I don’t really want to appear in print with an object that is so much prettier than I am, and I like the immediacy of a smile. Instagram is personalised advertising – Twitter with photographs – and it is just as good at inciting pain in others as professional advertising: you are invited to regard, with drooling envy, someone else’s perfect wedding, or perfect supper, or perfect life.

I don’t believe in the truth of the perfection that Instagram offers. I think, rather, the desire to post something bespeaks unhappiness. Instagram makes me feel sad. That is what it is for. I knew that when I first became aware of “The Rich Kids of Instagram”, who post photographs of themselves licking money near private aeroplanes.

Instagram – and all social media – is driving up personal debt and eroding the desire to save money. Debt culture meets internet shopping, and summons hell.

The people who get the most spurious attention on social media are the people who spend the most, then get sent everything for free; and so, if you are a fool, you too will spend money you don’t have to impress people you have never met.

This is so mad it is barely worth typing, but it is rational if you understand the loneliness – the disconnection – of the internet, where nothing feels real.

It is explicitly a drug, and, like all drugs, it has a curve: ecstasy, then denial, then chaos. Psychologists have warned us for many years, if we did not already know: the bigger your online, or fantasy, life, the smaller your real one. The prettier your online life, the uglier your real one, too.