How to Improve the World One #Decay Instagram Post at a Time
The time for seeing the perfection of reality is here
A flattened frog, rotting fish, bird in the water. Funghi on a tree. You won’t find those over-produced, so-called perfect world shots in my Instagram feed, but on occasion there will be a photo of decay. And if it rains, there will be greyness. Just as there is radiance in the pictures when the sun shines. It is as I see the world. Every day. Without filters. Well, okay, a filter now and then can compensate my lack of photography skills once in a while. Especially when it comes to lighting and contrast. But not to beautify a world that some perceive to be not beautiful enough. Simply because I think the real world is as beautiful as it gets. As perfect as it gets. Anything to make it appear other than that it really is, makes it, to me, less beautiful.
Projections in Plato’s Cave
Many of these over-produced, over-filtered Instagram posts, or advertisements, they are like those shadows in Plato’s cave. Projections of what somebody perceives to be the ideal version of the world. But not the perfect world itself. Just the projections. No anomalies, no spots, no explosion of colour or aroma. Just a projection of a perception of an ideal version of a dreamt reality.
The problem is, that we lose sight of the beauty of the uniqueness we all have. If we all look like those projections of perceptions, the world will be a boring place. A place of mass-produced projections. Of mass consumption, where we simply edit out the waste we create. Where ageing is a bad thing. A single-use society.
Embrace Decay
We also are losing sight of the beauty and perfection of decay. How wonderful is it that a dead tree is actually a source of life for so many new organisms, and eventually ends up as food for new trees. How wonderful is it that once thriving centres such as Angkor Wat or Machu Picchu were once thought lost to the jungles that overgrew them, then rediscovered to become major sites for tourism and arecheology? We should embrace imperfection. Embrace decay. Because decay stands for the circularity of life. And that is what we desperately need more of in this world. We need to stop all that single-use nonsense. That dogma that ageing is bad, or that our uniqueness is making us imperfect. These ideas have led us to destroy our world. We need to replace them.
So stop over-producing, or over-filtering your Instagram posts. Post a photo of the perfect imperfectness of the world around you. Post a photo of decay. Help the world shift paradigms, and help make it better.
