instagram isn't for your friends and ex lovers
"digital diaries", IG red flags, and your inner teenager's social media habits
…that’s what the alt account that you’ve built over the years to not make people you stalk on random Tuesdays suspect you don’t have a life, is for.
I was 16 when I created my IG account. A couple of kids in my class got iPods touch and we passed them around to play Subway Surfers and Fruit Ninja in Biology and other classes where the teacher lost control of a group of rowdy teenagers. The only other app besides classic games that started to spread like wildfire among teenagers in the whole town was Instagram, an app where cool kids were starting to post pictures instead of Facebook. The only way you could create an account back then was if you had an iPhone, an iPod touch or an iPad, and when I got my first iPhone that was one of the first things I did. The year I got my first iPhone also happened to be the year I went on a year long foreign exchange trip to California and all I did was post pictured of the ocean, my trips to SF, Las Vegas, and Yosemite for my now former classmates in Russia who were prepping for state exams and college admissions. “Ugh I am so jealous! I am in Lit right now and it’s awful,” my comments read.
Obviously, as any other teenage girl in America, I also posted for attention - I wanted my crush in Calc to think I am cool and the girl I couldn’t stand in Physics to know that I am cooler. As a teenager, you have your first crushes, you are daydreaming about your first kiss, you want to be liked and accepted but you are also so miserably shy and awkward that half of the social dynamics back when I was in school happened on Instagram and Facebook rather the lunch period. Comments and likes were equivalent of looks and verbal remarks, following and unfollowing stood for acceptance and interest, and your relationship status or a lock emoji in your Instagram bio were a huge deal to the whole school district.
When I transferred to a college in Boston, people would ask me for my Instagram at parties - phone numbers have become way too personal long time ago. I would often hear “Wow, your Instagram is so nice” from the kids who grew up in middle class New England families, wore boring Canada Goose parkas, and were probably going to retire in one of the local suburbs. “Ugh Boston is so nice and comforting because everyone there is mid,” my friend recently told me over $1 oysters in an LES bar where everyone was dripped in overpriced vintage. Look, it’s true. Everyone who went to my college in Boston was mid and so was their Instagram feed. Before Boston, I went to school in Orange County where every single ABG and sorority adjacent girl was VSCO-certified and had thousands of followers. We posted pretty sunsets, avocado toasts, concerts, but most importantly - ourselves. The stakes of having a nice IG profile have never been higher than in Los Angeles area in 2016.
“I don’t care if you are a girl or a guy, if all of your Instagram pictures are pictures of yourself, that’s a red flag. If I don’t see one picture of the sky, a dog, or a bagel, that’s a red flag,” said Whitney Cummings in one of her less unhinged pandemic podcast episodes. “Oh,” I thought, scrolling through nothing but pictures of myself on my IG grid. My mind instantly went to “Well, pictures of a person just perform better,” and it would take me a couple more years to realize I’ve only ever only posted for other people.
I’ve spent a good part of the last three months looking for lifestyle, fashion and beauty TikTok creators for work. At this point, I’ve seen thousands and closely investigated thousands of profiles. The ones that resonated with me personally aren’t the ones who essentially run a daily marketing campaign for things you don’t need from Amazon or the out of the world gorgeous girls with hundreds of thousands of followers. It’s the ones who reminds me of my best friends in high school and college, treating their profiles as a “digital diary.” Their IG looks like a Pinterest board for their lives. They aren’t in it for the money or the free stuff. It’s just something they do for fun the way I wrote a blog with ten followers in college and edited YouTube videos that were watched exclusively by my best friends and my mom.
I’ve always had a problem with people referring to YouTube videos and their Instagram grids as their “digital diary” because diaries are meant to be private. There is no way to get around the fact that when you post something online, there are at least a couple of people seeing it. But I think I am starting to get it now. If you really honest with yourself and are doing it right, the “digital diary” privacy isn’t about creating without hitting publish, it’s about creating as if you weren’t going to hit publish. Yes, the “dancing like no one is watching” bs if you will.
Making YouTube videos about a trip to Disneyland with my college friends lined with copyright free dance music, my vague writings about teenage heartbreaks in my blog, and playlists I curated over the pandemic without a plan to monetize them or use them for work are some of my favorite parts of my digital footprint. The two people who messaged me because of some of my more honest than clickbait-y Substacks are far more meaningful to me than the thousands of people who liked my clap back tweets.
The media you post online is apriori social but it’s more about finding a connection with the right couple of people than getting everyone, including the classmates you’ve long outgrown, to like or envy you. Think about it the way you think about going outside of your house - it’s something that you have to do and one way or another you are going to be perceived. Might as well not fight it and make the best out of it.
Same goes for who you choose to follow. At some point, my Instagram was so oversaturated with LA influencers, celebrities and ads that I unfollowed every single one of them and kept only the people I knew. It got boring! Real people posting on IG like it’s their Facebook - trips, engagements, parties, and hard launches, may be the glue that’s holding American families together but are arguably more depressing than looking at IG models’ Princess Polly ads.
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“Instagram is not for your friends, it’s not for those people in high school that you are trying to impress or make them see that you are doing well. Your social media presence is for you to put the vibration out into the worlds that you want to attract back. For opportunities, for expansion, for inspiration. Space where you put out into the world what inspires you. And then the people who also feel inspired by what inspires you are magnetized back to you. It’s not about impressing the laundry list of ex lovers, it about you and what you want to create in your life.”
Vibrations, manifestation, law of attraction and whatever else mediocre white men clown young and pretty girls for.
xx
So what’s your insta then? ☺️