The reason I wanted to talk about Instagram is the fact that I have been a victim to the "my life is better than you" or been the instigator for this phenomenon. Here's a little story for you all.
My freshman year of college, I moved to the state of Minnesota from Illinois not knowing anyone. I was placed in temporary housing which meant I actually didn't have a normal dorm experience and didn't have floor mates to be friends with, except for my three roommates. So, my first semester of college was a really lonely experience for me. With a lot of free time and little access to my friends, I would go on social media sites, like Instagram, to see how my friends were doing. I would see them posting pictures with their "new friends" and making it look like college was a fun time for them. I thought that I was alone in not having friends, there was something wrong with me since I was lonely but my friends weren't. When I went home for Thanksgiving, I was talking with my high school friends and we all realized that 1. none of us had friends despite what we posted on Instagram 2. we were all lonely and 3. we all kinda hated our first year of college. I knew all of this was true now by our verbalizations, but you could never tell by my Instagram or by anyone else's.
And now to my own Insta. I took a screen shot of my Instagram.
From this, you can see some trips I've made recently including: Utah and Paris. What you didn't see is how shitty of a semester I had including: CO poisoning in my house and getting kicked out and the time my car got stolen a week after the CO thing (lol yeah). I don't help with this phenomena either. If you go on my Instagram, you only see the things I want you to see, my "best life", and the fun adventures I went on since I'm such a "fun person." This isn't accurate at all to my life. I've realized writing this post how I don't help with our perceptions and I should be more authentic to my real life.
Thank you for sharing. I really resonate with this post in terms of how we only show case the best things in our lives and not the bad things in social media. I, too, only post photos of me traveling, scenery, food, and so forth. Like you said, it looks like we are adventurous based on our Instagram posts but in reality we are falling apart and a mess. There's nothing wrong to this because sometimes we just wanna post memories or just want to showcase it but like you said all of it isn't accurate to our lives. I can almost see this as like an escape to reality, but that's just me.
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