You Need To Spend Less Time On Instagram

The realities of life are not what you see on social media

Instagram is one of the most popular social media platforms in the world. An estimated 1 billion users are active on the platform. Anybody who is anybody in the world of entertainment is on Instagram.

Browse through the app and you are likely to see a lot of posts purporting the same thing. A lot of people posing in co-ordinated shots, bloggers, such as myself, posting images of far-flung destinations and plenty of very attractive people encouraging others to believe in themselves.

This all sounds fantastic. Who wouldn’t want to be on a platform where the most beautiful people in the world make you feel better and where you can find endless inspiration for places to travel?

When you look at it this way, it makes complete sense to use the app frequently. However, as with anything, there are two sides to the story.

A lot of what you see on Instagram isn’t real. Most of these images are pre-arranged to show a particular side of people. You only see them at their good moments. You don’t see them when they are at their lowest ebb.

The same applies to the accounts posting pictures of beautiful places. What you don’t see is the time it took to get to these places. The long, never-ending journeys and boredom that ensued on them.

When we browse through Instagram we are subconsciously taking all this in and assuming that if everyone is so happy, then that means I need to be to.

Instagram is displaying a skewed narrative, one that is baked in optimism. You may see no issue with this. After all, wouldn’t the world be a better place if more of us were optimistic?

This misses a key facet of human life, suffering. It’s an intrinsic part of life and one that is conspicuous by its absence on Instagram. The world is a chaotic and uncertain place. It’s not flowers and rainbows as we often see on social media.

Optimism is important, without it, we would walk around depressed and miserable. Too much, however, and it leads to decay in our relationship with reality. A relationship that is essential if we are to make sense of an ever-changing world.

The Problem With Instagram

The reason I chose to focus on Instagram is that it has come to symbolise the obsession with image and the self that has become prevalent in our age. The app started life as a simple photo-sharing platform, but it has morphed into something much different.

Instead of being a place where we post interesting photos we have taken, it has become a virtual marketplace. One, where we are the market. Our lives have become a commodity, one we want to portray to the world in the best possible light.

The popularity of Instagram coincided with the rise of the selfie. A narcissistic way of taking photos for a narcissistic age. Without realising it, we have turned ourselves into curators of our own lives.

Browse through the profile of most of your friends and the famous people you follow, and you will rarely find an intimate moment being shared. You’re unlikely to see a photo of a couple in the middle of a row, or a someone looking lonely by themselves in their flat.

The photos are almost always choreographed photoshoots or selfies of ourselves that we have decided to post after 30 minutes of trying to find the right angle. The intricacies and mundanity of everyday life are a long way from the image we portray of ourselves on Instagram.

The same is true of my niche, the travel industry. As a travel blogger, I post images of places that I have visited on my travels. These may be photos of cities, mountains, or architecture that I have come across.

If you scroll through my feed, you’re unlikely to find any photos of me when I was stuck in an airport for 20 hours waiting for a connecting flight or driving for 14 hours from Rotterdam to Geneva.

You don’t see what goes on behind the scenes, you only see what the person posting the photos wants you to see. It’s akin to looking at the world through a set of blinkers. You see part of the picture. If all you see is white sand, blue skies and calm water, you’ll assume everything is well.

If you took off the blinkers, you may see the storm rolling in from the east, or the pieces of plastic scattered across the beach. Reality is much more subtle and layered than what we see on social media.

This is not a problem if you recognise this fact. It becomes a problem when you don’t. If you see these photos and want to live this life, without inquiring what the rest of this life looks like, you’re going to be disappointed when your expectations are not met.

This is the problem with too much optimism. It can blind you to the realities of life. The world we see on Instagram is not representative of the one we inhabit. You cannot curate real life. Unfortunately, suffering, pain and agony will creep in.

Pessimism is a dirty word in our overly optimistic times, but it’s essential to the functioning of life. The irony is to be happy a dose of pessimism is necessary to keep your optimism in check.

Reality Bites

Our age is perhaps the most optimistic in history. We are more interconnected than ever before. It’s easy to communicate with the world and reach more people than ever before.

This has resulted in us chasing vanity metrics that can be detrimental to our wellbeing. Then there is the issue of curating our lives in a manner to make it seem like everything is well when in private, we are all a lot sadder than we would care to admit.

The Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran was no fan of optimism. His views on existence were as follows:

“Only an idiot could think there is a point to any of this.”

When we strip life down to its purest essence, all we are left with is the void of our existence. It is meaningless. When the sands of time no longer turn, our very existence will be forgotten in the cold death of the universe.

All that we worked for, all that we have fought over will be rendered impotent and pointless. For a lot of us, this is a horrifying way to look at life. There has to be some meaning to it, a reason why we are all muddling through life on a giant rock in space.

The reality is that we are all here by chance. The odds of our existence is infinitesimally small. the mere fact that our Earth is hospitable to life is a miracle in itself, let alone that an intelligent species should rise to live on it.

This may seem overly pessimistic, but is the uncomfortable truth of life, one that is hard to stomach. Instead of being an uncomfortable thought, it should be a liberating one. We should feel lighter when considering our place in the universe.

Optimism can only take us so far. As much as we would like to, very few of us will emulate the celebrities we see living a life of luxury. It’s a life few of us will ever lead, but would we want to?

Do we want the stress, the constant pressure of being famous, of having millions follow your every action? I doubt we would. Instagram offers us a window into this life, but we are only seeing one room. That room may be well presented, but the rest of the house might be a mess.

The reality of life is that it is full of pain and torment. We can wish it away and live our lives through the prism of our Instagram profile, but that is a hollow existence.

These torments are how we make sense of life and find purpose in it. It’s often in our darkest moments that we have deep realisations and grow to better ourselves.

Instagram is a way to escape the harsh realities of life. It is a place where we can present an idealised image of ourselves, one which we would like to be, but one that we never will be. We turn to this platform to help us cope with life, to bury our head in the sand and hope our ills will disappear.

An overly optimistic world ignores the inconveniences of reality. The sense of discomfort and helplessness that many of us feel. Instead of stepping into this world, we should recede from it.

We all know that Disney fairytales are just that, fairytales. Now, it’s time that we realised the world we see on Instagram is not the one we inhabit.