Instagram

 

    I remember when Instagram first appeared. When it was its own thing, a wee app for recording little snaps and sharing them, instantly. You’d take a photo of wherever you were, upload it, use one of the built-in filters to make it look grainy and vintage, maybe sepia toned and then share it.

    Of course, it didn’t take long before people started using it to show edited highlights of their lives. Nobody wants to share the everyday boring stuff, the mundane. Who wants to see that? Real life is boring isn’t it.

Then it’s only a small step to trying to impress people. Look at me! Look how together I am! Look at my beautiful life, my beautiful house, my beautiful family. Then it’s an even smaller step to try and get people to buy stuff so that their lives can be just as beautiful. Then because everybody is trying to influence everybody else you need to stand out, so you’re paying to sponsor your posts. People are buying followers, look at me now, look how many followers I have. Now it’s corporate, companies are giving people stuff so that they can sell it to their followers. Now Facebook (now Meta) have bought it and it’s gone the same way as that has and become a whole toxic mess full of sponsored posts and ads.

Yikes.

I couldn’t look at Instagram for ages, my brain isn’t wired to cope with the extra noise. I don’t want to see posts from people that I aren’t following. The algorithm showing me everything except what I actually want to see. Then I read that there was a way to see only posts from people you are following and in chronological order (yes! The Holy Grail). So I started looking again, looking only though, not posting. What did I have to post? I don’t live a glamorous life, I live in rented accommodation, my work clothes tend to be loose and usually covered in ink and/or glue.

Then I realised that I was falling into the edited highlights trap. The thing is, I like taking photos, I really like taking photos. Just snapping at things that catch my eye, like the way the shadow from the tree outside is projected onto the kitchen cupboards. Like the way the late sun catches the coloured glass bottles on a shelf. Like the way the golden hour light makes my plants look. Like the piece of jewellery/knitting/crochet/whatever I’ve just made. My phone’s camera roll is full of them. What do?

I’ve started taking a bunch of photos every day, selecting a few and making one post with a wee carousel of photos and captioning it with whatever the day is. No filters, no hashtags, just the day. Now, I don’t have that many followers, and that is fine. I’m not posting for anybody but myself. Mind you that doesn’t mean I don’t sometimes start looking for things to post but I am working on shifting that mindset. 

The pictures that I post are probably boring to most people, there are a lot of similar ones; after all I spend most of my time at home. However, they are a reflection of my actual lived experience (though without the constant noise of dogs and aircraft and people) and real life is mostly doing the same things over and over. Real life is kind of boring for most people and that is fine, there’s a reason that “may you live in interesting times” is used as a curse. I don’t think that we should try and hide all that mundane stuff, it is the stuff of most of our lives and if we can’t celebrate that then what are we doing?