I SUPER love Instagram (IG). I really do to the point that I’ve deactivated from Facebook almost a year ago but I just couldn’t give up totally on my IG.
However, it can also get pretty messed up because more than any other social platform, it encouraged us to interpret the professional and personal lives of other people into sheer porn, food and travel porn, motivation porn, fitness porn, start-up porn and so on.
Nope. I don’t think this has something to do with the current world, the millennials or ‘kids these days’ nor superficiality. It’s about the sense that humans had for centuries, wanting to live lives through others.
While social media positively challenged the norms in so many ways, it also turned some of us into potential avatars, would-be lives that we can take on and try to believe are our own. And the only reason the situation is worse is because there are so many more lives and role models to look at and influencers to be obsessed over.
So what does this behaviour do? It does a couple of things. But the biggest ones are, first, it gives us a false-sense of achievement. It’s when we imagine that we are the people we’re perving out on, and pretending we’re in their shoes.
Second, it can destroy the value we place on our own lives. It makes us excessively compare where we’re at with everyone else in the world, with people who have achieved more, and done more, and it exposes the leaks in the way we live. And there’s no better way to hate oneself than to look at someone he love just a little more.
It might not be a mindful thing, but I’ll bet you do it as much as anyone else. I’ll bet you do it more than yours truly.
You do it when you see people who are fit, who live glam-lives, who seem happier, cooler, sleeker and shinier than you. You do it (modesty aside) when I post about my so called ‘self-made’ career and the grind-mentality. You do it when Anne Tristine posts about food, products and the lovely places she’s walking on. You did it when Jericho Arceo got his 200,000th Youtube subscriber.
I’m going to be a little harsh. Pointing fingers at anyone for filling your feed with content that halts you and make you fantasize is a total cop out. It’s weak, my friend. It is.
Instagram can be awesome. If we’re carefully not over-doing it, it really can be motivating, artistic, creative, a visual wonderland of the coolest stuff. It can introduce us to the best ideas and folks, make us laugh as heck and make us fight for what we want. But it’s not going to do that if we can’t set the ceiling on it.
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