I Live in L.A. and Don’t Have an Instagram Account
Before I begin this piece, I want to be clear that I’m not trying to undermine the potential influence of Instagram. I think Instagram can be a powerful marketing and personal branding platform. Especially in the current environment, many people are turning to Instagram for a convenient depository of #BLM resources and opinions — what a beautiful usage of social media to elevate Black achievements, amplify Black voices, demonstrate that Black Lives Matter.
I’m not here to convince you to deactivate or delete your account. I’m merely here to provide another opinion, and the diversity of perspectives is never a bad thing. If you love your time on Instagram and feel that you have a healthy relationship with it, then I’m happy for you. My lack of Instagram account is entirely a personal choice; allow me to outline why:
One of my go-to fun facts when introducing myself is the fact that I don’t have Instagram. I’m often met with incredulous looks and small gasps from the audience (often from the same Millennial generation). In fact, I even put it as a part of my dating app bio (back when I was active on dating apps) and it became the source of many curious opening lines.
“OMG, you’re SO unique!”
“Do you feel like you don’t have friends?”
“What do you even do when you’re bored? Like what if you’re standing in a long line?”
Is it really such a big definition of my personality…to not have Instagram? I still feel like I have a great social life. I listen to podcasts (I thought they were lame for the longest time, but now I’m hooked), audio books (just finished Andrew Yang’s “Smart People Should Build Things” on Audible), and in REALLY long lines, I like to play Heads Up.
As a disclaimer, I’m somewhat on other forms of social media: Facebook (an awesome event planning tool and Messengers proves to be a convenient alternative to the dreaded “Green Bubble” text messages), Snapchat (I subscribe to four dog channels), and LinkedIn (does this count as social media?). I don’t know why, but Instagram always seemed to be a different beast to me. My friends in high school slowly migrated to Instagram throughout our four years, despite the fact that Facebook and Snapchat seemed to be all the rage when we began school; by the time we graduated, I was among only a handful of others without an Instagram presence.
Many attempted to convince me to download and sign up for Instagram, sometimes even going as far as bribing me with cash (“I’ll pay you $5 if you sign up right now”). But I always told them the same thing: it’s too impersonal, too high visibility to people I don’t really know, and I didn’t see how it was different from Snapchat (my justification was that you could set stories and send “DM’s” to your friends on both platforms).
But the real reason behind my pushback was that I was scared. I remember posting something on Facebook in high school, and relishing the instant gratification that came with “Likes.” I even went as far as to research the best times to post on Facebook to receive the most amount of “Likes,” perhaps internally trying to justify the hours and hours of filtering, editing, and resizing the same photo. I remember counting the number of “Likes,” that came in every minute, and even texting my dormmates to “Like” my photo if they hadn’t yet. I would scroll through my oversaturated photos, feeling the empty satisfaction that was proportional to the attention I received. This was my relationship with my first social media account — an unhealthy spiral of an agonizing scrutiny of photos that didn’t look like myself and of text posts that were curated to generate the most amount of comments.
Perhaps this irresponsibility was the result of the novelty of the social network and the increasing dependency of digital interaction to keep our social lives afloat, or perhaps it came with the naiveté of being in high school. I’m not denying the possibility that I could have had a much healthier relationship with Instagram. But I know for a fact that if I had jumped on the Instagram bandwagon in high school, I would dwell on the flawlessly curated content of others, and even now, would probably be scrolling through my feed instead of writing articles on Medium.
Here is a brief list of other internal musings on why I chose to stay away from Instagram as a platform. The majority of these reasons are deeply personal:
1. I choose not to live others’ lives (i.e. Social Comparison Theory).
I went to a boarding school. It was a picture-perfect four-experience of preppy privilege, complete with Sperry boat shoes and salmon-colored shorts. With this experience came a high price tag, and unfortunately, as an international student, I was not offered any financial aid options. Caught in the cycle of paying off my education loans and volatile family financial transitions, my family ended up moving into my grandparent’s one room attachment to their cramped home during my sophomore year in high school. I’m only able to complain about this because of my baked-in privilege of attending a pricey (but in hindsight, worth it!) boarding school during the process of pursuing my education goals- I should have been grateful to have a had a roof above my head and a loving family to support me. But as an anxious sixteen-year-old sleeping head-to-foot with my parents on the floor, seeing my friends’ photos on boats and petting exotic animals during their summer break was heartbreaking. I remember crying on the floor about other people’s idyllic lives, as my mom bagged groceries during the week and my dad worked seven days a week from dawn to midnight. Thus, began my journey of understanding that a large part of my happiness stems from social comparison. I did not recognize the gravity of allowing such comparisons, especially with those around me from different socioeconomic backgrounds, to dictate my happiness, but I knew enough not to trust myself to have a healthy relationship with Instagram, a platform that seemed to boast even more picturesque ideals of experiences that just simply weren’t within my reach.
2. I choose not to measure my success with others’ validation.
When I found myself starting to quantify “social success” with “Likes” and “Shares,” I knew that I had to put some more thought into what success meant for me. As I grew older and my friend circle smaller and tighter, I started realizing that the number of friends I had on Facebook did not equal the size of my support system. Simultaneously, I put some thought into how I define success, and how I can redefine it beyond the scope of curating social media posts to generate attention. I recognize that success is a subjective concept, and I’m at peace with how I’ve defined it and how I’m working towards achieving it. Being on Instagram is not a key step in working towards achieving that success for me right now. A part of this decision stems from my initial misstep of measuring my success with others’ validation.
3. I choose not to get disappointed by reality.
I live in downtown LA — an urban privilege that I have and that I’m incredibly grateful for. Perhaps LA is the beacon of Instagramming — we seem to have an endless supply of “Instagrammable” (is this term officially in the dictionary?) places, experiences, and food. There are so many times that I’ve gone to places that my friends “discovered” on Instagram, and found that the perfect shot resulted from a portion of a rundown wall, or that the food was actually a third of the size than it looked like in the photos.
Experiencing firsthand the skewed perception of others’ lives makes me question…were the times I spent crying on my room floor while looking at others’ pictures of luxurious vacations worth it? Or was I upset over a mere perception of wealth, belonging, and worthiness (only because these fancy posts got the most amount of attention) that I had conjured up in my head? Either way, the stress of expectation vs. reality reaches far beyond a subpar baked good or faded graffiti on cracked walls that “look better in photos”, and their widespread idealization on Instagram would not serve me well.
I cannot deny that Instagram is evolving as a platform. It is emerging as a centralized location of reliable information about worldly causes, while exploring ways to help with the validation epidemic through UI changes like restricting the visibility of “Likes.” Perhaps most importantly, Instagram is serving as a platform to elevate voices of those (local businesses, minority thought leaders) whose voices are hushed in everyday life. Despite the opportunities that come with the platform, in the spirit of my past experiences and my present and future mental fitness, I’m choosing to stay away from Instagram….for now.
What do you think? Share your opinions in the Comments!
