Stop Worrying About How Your Life Looks on Instagram
By: Justice King
Tags: Productivity, Social Media, Self Improvement, Digital Life, Technology

Stop Worrying About How Your Life Looks on Instagram

How to live your life for you. Not for the people who are watching.

Photo by Ishan @seefromthesky on Unsplash

In the age of Instagram, it’s easy to get caught up in trying to portray a certain image. In the pursuit of likes and engagement, we can forget to live our lives for ourselves. One of the first steps toward leading a happier life is to stop and take a moment for yourself. Stop worrying about how your life looks and start focussing on how it feels.

If you’re continually policing yourself based on how other people see your life, you aren’t living it for yourself. Being online makes it too easy for us to compare our lives to the lives of everyone around us. Consequently, too many of us fall into a pattern of working hard to portray our lives in a particular way. This is especially true for Millenials and Gen Z—I’m speaking from experience.

What if nobody could see your beautiful trip to Italy? Would you still enjoy these experiences as much if you couldn’t instantly share them with your followers?

We compare ourselves to our peers, sometimes without even knowing it, and get to the point where we’re trying to achieve the appearance of being happy instead of trying to find what will actually make us happy. Ask yourself what you would do on vacation if you didn’t have social media. What would you do this weekend if nobody knew? What if nobody could see your beautiful trip to Italy? What if you couldn’t Snapchat an encounter with your favorite celebrity? Would you still enjoy these experiences as much if you couldn’t instantly share them with your followers? Would you be happy with your life if other people couldn’t see it or praise it in the comments section? The obvious answer should be yes, but a lot of people find discomfort at the thought of nobody knowing about the super cool things they’re doing.

The people renting private jets (or yachts) for a day so that they can boast about the luxurious lives they’re leading to their followers come to mind. Did you know people do that? It’s a real thing. Yes, I did just provide you with a link to a private jet rental company. No, I’m not suggesting it. It’s simply for illustrative purposes! I hope it did its job. If you’re anything like me, you’re somewhere between slight shock and wishing you had enough money to rent a private jet. I sure do! Doesn’t mean I’d use it to rent a jet, though. As an environmentalist, I can’t imagine a worse use for my money.

It’s not your fault if you think this way. Silicon Valley works tirelessly to exploit our brain chemistry and find every possible way to keep us hooked on their tech. Platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook are designed to keep us coming back for more. In a New York Times article, How Evil Is Tech? David Brooks explains,

The second critique of the tech industry is that it is causing this addiction on purpose, to make money. Tech companies understand what causes dopamine surges in the brain and they lace their products with ‘hijacking techniques’ that lure us in and create ‘compulsion loops.’ — David Brooks, The New York Times

While I may not think these companies are inherently evil, I do believe they are majorly unproductive if you use them the wrong way. It’s no surprise that they don’t have our best interests in mind. That means it’s up to us to look out for ourselves and recognize that our brains have a trained attachment to followers, likes, comments, subscribers, and any other type of social engagement on social media. It’s not just on familiar platforms like Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram, either. It’s any internet community where we receive positive feedback. Once you’re able to understand that there’s more to you than how you appear online, you’ll have so much more room in your life to focus on what matters. It feels good to be authentic to yourself rather than putting on a show for people you barely know.

Riddle me this: why would you want to waste your time just trying to appear to be someone when you could go out and really be someone? Can’t think of a reason? That’s what I thought! So, respectfully, dear reader, who I genuinely care about, get your head out of your Instagram account (or whatever your preferred social media account is) and start paying more attention to what makes you feel good. You owe it to yourself.

Taking regular breaks from my phone is what works for me. I wrote about an experience where I spent an entire week without my phone here in this other piece for The Startup. The more time I spend away from my phone, the less distracted I am by endless feeds of incoherent content, and the more time I have to invest in myself. I used to spend a lot of my time worrying about how my life looked on Instagram. But, after taking a three-month break from all of my social media accounts (through total deactivation, not just logging out), I inadvertently reshaped my relationship with my online self.

Three months without social media can seem like a lifetime to some of us who grew up with these platforms deeply ingrained in our everyday lives, but it didn’t feel that way to me. The more time I spent without my accounts, the less I wanted to go back. It wasn’t my first rodeo, so I somewhat knew what to expect. But I couldn’t have predicted what the effect would be in the long-term. Without social media, I was doing more and more things for myself without worrying about who knew it. I didn’t take a snap every time I went to the gym. I wasn’t posting stories about the crazy day I had. I didn’t feel the need to make a post to rack up likes and satisfy a misplaced desire for online engagement. I didn’t feel obligated to share any part of my life. It belonged to me and nobody else. My newfound privacy did wonders for my productivity levels and my mental health.

The issue with working hard to portray a specific online persona is that, in the last decade or so, there’s been a rising trend of “Instagram envy.” So many people scroll through their feed and want someone else’s life based on how they portray themselves online. Fewer people are focused on doing things for themselves.

Now, I know that envy has existed longer than humankind. Some vivid flashbacks to feisty primates fighting over a lover on the Discovery channel come to mind. Or the easily thought up image of jealous dogs watching their owners give love and affection to another pet. But envy through social media? The customary routine of sitting in bed or at work and scrolling for hours looking at beautiful houses, sculpted bodies, dream jobs. That’s new! It’s so common to log onto Instagram and want to be somebody else or have someone else’s life, but it’s an extremely sad reality. Take a moment to think about it; wanting to be somebody else. Who would be you? We owe it to ourselves to give us a chance. Life can feel crazy shitty, but it’s also the greatest gift we could ever have. If we don’t live our own lives, who will? No one else can do that for us.

When I used to have a large following on my old Instagram account, people would always message me saying, “Your life is so perfect. I’m so jealous, I wish that were me” and I hated it. Jealous? Of me? That was a massive eye-opener because I knew my life was nowhere close to perfect. It still isn’t, and I don’t expect it to be. The word “perfect” has also never sat right with me. Behind the scenes, nobody’s life is perfect. The age of the influencer has given us enough unrealistic expectations to last multiple lifetimes. When I was a devout Instagram user, I wasn’t intentionally trying to portray a specific image — not consciously at least — I was just sharing pictures of the places I’d traveled. I was trying to put positive messages out there. But Instagram blurred my vision of the world. There’s more than one way to use your voice for spreading positivity and accomplishing your goals, and Instagram doesn’t have to be one of them. Not the only one, at least.

I’ve taken a significant step back from Instagram and Snapchat lately. I still have the accounts, but they’re private, and I’m not logged into them. I don’t have Facebook, and I rarely use Twitter. What I’ve learned is that it’s extremely easy to contribute to Instagram envy without knowing it, but it doesn’t have to be that way. I don’t want to put a false image out there. Our lives are so uniquely ours, and nobody else gets to be us. That desire to be someone else is based on an idea, a curated image, not reality. Imagine wanting to be someone else when you don’t even know who that person is. Absurd, right?

Rarely will we ever honestly know someone else’s truth. Anyone’s online persona is based on the parts of their life that they decide to share. So, next time you want to be someone else, whether that means heavily curating your Instagram feed or wanting someone else’s life as your own, take a step back and evaluate your situation. Remind yourself that what you’re seeing is not necessarily all truth. Even if it is, you’re most likely just seeing the highlights.

Focus on how your life feels instead of how it looks from the outside. That doesn’t mean you can’t share it, but don’t work so hard to manipulate what people see. You can’t, or at least shouldn’t, try to shape people’s opinions of you. All you can do is be yourself and be as authentic as you can online. More importantly, love your life because it’s yours. It’s unique to you, and nobody else will ever get to experience it the way you can. Try not to be jealous of people and enjoy your life while you still can.

This article was published at www.arewestrangers.com