How Social Media Ruined My Summer

As we are in a world full of so-called ‘clickbait’, I wish I could confess that this post’s title is just another instance of that, but I’d be lying. Now before you, quite rightly, perceive me as a spoiled millennial who isn’t grateful of the past three months away from university and back in the comfortable nest of my childhood home, I cannot deny that it has featured some moments of pure joy. But when you hit the awkward in-between age of 20, you start to, unfortunately, get a life. From internships to the commencement of placement years, from jobs based away from home, to long travelling stints, my friends from home seemed to be perpetually busy this summer, which undoubtedly brought them fulfilment, but brought me complete boredom.

I would say I’m a reasonably independent person, but not on the year-long-solitary-travel-around-the-world level, meaning that a whole month bound to my empty hometown with nothing but university work to catch up on really started to take a toll on me. Like most people my age, I turned to social media to fill this void — but I quickly noticed that it only seemed to partially fill it, like how a single drag may feel to a smoker, or a single square of chocolate may feel to a chocoholic. And with this newfound boredom, I was ever-vehement to stuff this void so that that it was jam-packed, increasing my daily usage on Instagram from about 20 minutes to hours and hours. This was indeed counter-productive. It was a peculiar feeling; in small doses, the occasional scroll served to provide a surface-level solace, knowing that my friends were having fun and creating memories, however ramping this dosage up meant a flurry of side-effects. My self-awareness of my addiction finally came when I would close the Instagram app in hopes of finding something else to do, then reopening it just seconds later, without even realising.

Without sounding too ‘woe is me’, I am not afraid to declare that I am an insecure person. Over time, I have struggled to get to a point where these insecurities are kept at bay. But this extra Instagram-time didn’t open a can of worms. Rather it took a hammer to the can such that the worms oozed out everywhere.

I follow a lot of male lifestyle profiles whose account holders have joined the omnipresent clan of ‘Instagram models’; these accounts share a plethora of content such fitness routines, style advice and outfit ideas. The main impetus for this is merely my sheer interest for this sort of thing, but it also gives me a boost of inspiration. A brief run in with the green-eyed monster once in a while can be personally beneficial — it gives me something to strive for. But regular daily meetings with it commenced a downwards spiral.

When I wasn’t obsessing over social media, I read an article about just how much jealousy’s scope has progressed in the past decades. For our grandparents’ generation, partly due to smaller schools and a lesser emphasis on physical appearance, they perhaps had one or two people whom they were jealous of aesthetically. For our parents’, maybe due to the improved provision of television and improved visibility of celebrities, they were perhaps envious of up to ten people. Well for me, I could write down a list of over 100 individuals that I wished I looked like due to social media right now — without taking a break to look at who I follow on Instagram. What’s more, our vocabulary is made up of thousands of terms (like ‘filter’, ‘Facetune’, ‘ insta feed’, ‘woman crush Wednesday’) that my grandparents don’t know, let alone were concerned with as a young adult.

This bitter envy evolved into insecurity, but my optimistic side initially tried to reason with it. In spite of its power to cause me to think badly about myself, there was an element of it that I naively found comforting: the ‘magic of maybe’. ‘Maybe if I go to the gym five times a week instead of four, I will look like that’. ‘Maybe if I cut dairy out of my diet, my acne will completely clear, and I could look like him’. ‘Maybe if I spend hundreds of pounds on treatments, that will be me’. That could be me someday. With increased time on the app, it appeared as though Instagram knew my weakness and had some sort of vendetta against me, as its algorithm meant that it showed me more and more of these self-esteem-damaging profiles on my ‘Explore’ page. So much so that these ‘maybes’ soon developed into ‘never’s — I will never look like that. And it’s not just me; according to new data from the University of New South Wales and Macquarie University, it takes a mere 30 minutes for Instagram to wreck a person’s positive body image and evoke newfound negative feelings on their weight and appearance.

For no particular reason, I decided to trawl through the comments of a photo that made me feel especially low. A user expressed a mutual hopelessness and quoted that they now have a dependence on an app called Facetune: something with which I was not yet acquainted. Put simply, it is a photo editing app that is specifically targeted to people like me to smooth over any insecurities, to create the best possible version of yourself; albeit a version that doesn’t actually exist in the world. A quick play around on the app had me staggered not only by the effectiveness of its features, but the ease at which I could be relinquished of anything I didn’t like about myself, like rubbing out a pencil smudge with an eraser. The term ‘filter’ is completely apt — much like a sieve, these filters serve to let only the good things through to the person on the other side of the screen, only the things that the user is proud to show off.

Once I realised that most of these Instagram models rely heavily on these editing apps, in addition to the personal hair stylists/makeup artists/photographers that were on hand, I had, for want of a better word, a breakthrough. It finally sunk in that these beauty standards were totally and utterly unattainable — because nobody walking on this planet ACTUALLY looks like the people the photos depict. Pixel by pixel, an imaginary person was displayed on the screen before me. Forgive me if this all sounds very obvious. It appears ironic that the seemingly unachievable ‘love yourself’ mantra is said so regularly in this current age, when apps that blur out stretch marks, whiten your teeth and even alter the outline of your body (the list goes on) are simultaneously so easily accessible. Public health experts are even calling for social media platforms to introduce a series of protocols which help combat this problem, such as pop-ups warning people that they have used social media for a long time and highlighting when photos have been digitally manipulated.

Now I’m not saying that every single picture which sent me down this black hole of insecurity this summer had been edited. And there are things about me that I will never be able to change. As with any confidence knock, this wound still needs a while to heal. But I’ve come to understand that with any physical insecurity, they are only really visible to to the person who harbours them. And while that’s not the esteemed goal of ‘loving yourself’, it’s a start.

So what followed was a cleanse: I deleted the Instagram app off my phone for two weeks. Why not for good you ask? Because all in all, it is an addiction. Akin to quicksand, it pulls you back in, just when you think you’re over it. And I still believe that it is possible for me to reap its benefits… in moderation. As much as I wish I could declare that I have gone cold turkey, it instead lives a solitary existence in an app folder on page 5 of my apps named ‘don’t open this for ur sanity’.

The real lesson that I have learned here (aside from the importance of getting a job next summer so I’m not this bored again), is to be wary of the effects Instagram has on mental health and to watch out for any warning signs for the future. And despite the quicksand of Instagram being ever-potent, this awareness may be the thing that prevents me from being sucked down even further in the future, to the point where all that is around me is complete darkness.

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