I love Instagram. It’s my favorite social media app. I check it probably 20 times a day. When I’m bored, you can find me scrolling through the explore page or stalking celebrities. I definitely started taking it more seriously once I came to college because I started following new people from all different places and saw how well organized and aesthetically pleasing a lot of people make their pages, and tried to emulate that. But lately I’ve come to a realization about how fake it really is.
Instagram is meant to be a visual medium for displaying what you’re doing, but that can just inspire the fear of missing out. When I see people going out on the weekends all over Instagram, and I’m not, I feel like I’m doing something wrong. If my friends from home look like they’re having a better college experience than I am at their respective schools, I wonder if maybe I made the wrong choice in picking my university. FOMO is a phenomenon that social media has fueled, if not started, because we can see what our peers are doing at almost all times, and if we’re not doing something just as cool, or if we weren’t invited to that same party, we’re very aware of it. Our parent’s generation didn’t have that problem. Unless you saw someone in person, you really didn’t know what they were up to.
I have also come to notice how I use Instagram has changed because of that. When I go do something fun on the weekends, one of my first thoughts is how I can get a cool picture to post on Instagram. If my pictures turn out bad and not post worthy, I feel bad about myself and I wonder why I’m not as photogenic as the other girls I follow. Places like Graffiti Pier seem to exist only to take pictures. So much of the time I spend places is about getting a good picture, or taking pictures of my friends, that I’m not focused on actually having a good time, just showing that I’m having a good time on social media. Some people take it even more seriously than that. The color scheme of their feed dictates what they can post and keeping it aesthetically pleasing is very important to them. It becomes no longer about sharing fun times and memories and only about aesthetics. There are even apps that will organize your pictures so you can post them in an order that makes your feed look the best.
When I think about how much work I put into taking pictures and making sure my Instagram is displaying that I’m living my best life, I think that the other accounts that I admire are probably doing the same exact thing. Are any of us actually having fun? Or are we just trying to show other people that we are? One of my good friends deleted her Instagram a couple years ago and she told me she never misses it. She feels like she can enjoy the memories she’s making while she’s making them, instead of trying to create a picture she can post and then look back on to reminisce. I probably would never go as far to delete my account, but I definitely need to stop taking it so seriously. We all need to stop comparing ourselves and our lives to what we see on social media, because chances are not everyone is as happy as they seem. Our social media presence is not an accurate representation of our lives, so we need to remember to have fun and repress the FOMO.