The summer isn’t usually my favorite season but I know I’m in a minority. For most people, the warm temperature brings a sense of leisure, not to mention laziness and latitude. For me, the season heralds the time that my body and I sit on opposite ends of an aggressively long conference table and negotiate our terms of mutual loathing for the next 12 months. Gone is the easy security of a sweater; banished is the comforting covering of a coat; T-shirt weather has arrived, and there ain’t no place you and your winter chub can hide.
After a protracted and frankly insulting argument with my love handles (now dubbed hate pockets), this year I decided to embark on a strict but nurturing diet for the next 30 days in order to be, or at least appear, more casual in my summer casuals. Long time readers may be able to detect that I follow this pattern of self-loathing-meets-fasting-meets-fried-food-frenzy every year. If you have, I’m glad you know me that well but I’m also uninterested in what you have to say about it because that’s what my therapist is for. Anyway, I’m on Week 2 and have already lost a sizable amount of body weight. It’s amazing what some good old fashioned calorie counting can achieve. Plot twist: to lose weight you have to eat less than you burn. The principle is, like all hard work, cruel and callous, and it’s no wonder we’d all rather just have the last pizza slice and go to bed.
Within four seconds I saw people frolicking in seaside resorts against impossibly blue oceans
But I’m committed. Given my modest progress, you can understand how, while guzzling my lean green protein shake after a morning run this week, I was feeling rather pleased with myself. That’s when I made the mistake of logging onto my Instagram account. For the more reclusive amongst you, Instagram is like a pictures-only Twitter. Some of the accounts I follow: artists, museums, entertainers, galleries, movie stars, friends, family, foes, three fashion houses, Dr. Pimple Popper, several meat factories in Italy and a bakery in Slovenia. The rest of my feed comprises fitness models and instructors who post things about weight loss/exercise routines as an excuse to flaunt their bodies with gratuitous semi-nudity. (Your account may be different: You may follow people who like 18th century doll heads, I’m not here to judge.) Within four seconds I saw people frolicking in seaside resorts against impossibly blue oceans, holding coconuts and hashtagging their lives with things like #summervibes, #sun, #life, #happy. Standing there next to my sink of dirty dishes while sporting stained sweatpants and a potbelly, my immediate response was #vomit, #hopeyoudie, #sorrynotsorry. This was followed by a depressing 20-minute examination of why I am not on a yacht in the Riviera like everyone else. #whyme.
It’s not entirely my fault, though. The summer is also the time that most of my online community is posting about their holiday travels. The pictures are brushed and hazy, like instant memories, and that’s sort of the point of filters. There are made-to-project perfect-looking people sitting on perfect-looking beaches smiling perfectly about their perfect lives. The Facebook generation is no stranger to the near-constant feeling that omnipresent social media has wrought on the world i.e. that everyone’s attending a party you weren’t invited to. It takes no small measure of self-assurance to remember that these pictures are carefully curated and painstakingly shot in order to serve that in-the-moment perfection that is, by definition, unreal.
The difference between Instagram and real life can be a stark one
You’ve seen the phenomenon in practice yourself. Remember that girl you passed holding up her ice cream cone to her lips for a selfie; recall the group of pouting women sitting at a restaurant table making duck faces; recollect the guy at the gym who does nothing but work out and eat chicken breasts, taking well-lit pictures of his abs in front of the locker room mirror; or even that guy at the coffee shop carefuly arranging a depth shot of his cappauccino resting in front of two open books (#workhard).
I am not immune to this self-obsession. I use Instagram whenever I am on holiday, though less out of a sense of bragging than one of keeping in touch without having to write email, but I use it nevertheless. Occasionally you’ll even catch me hashtagging, because #yolo. Maybe social media can’t help but be about bragging. Look at my perfectly set table, my body, my friends, my group, my clothes, my life. Look at me.
And believe me, I look. As do so many others. Which is how I know that Instagram fame is not an immediate guarantor of real life success. When you meet these people in real life they seem so diminished compared to their projected image (this is even worse when you meet Twitter-famous people, who look mostly like trolls). Online fame has more to do with a commitment to keeping up with the whole thing. I know several people whose Instagram followers number well into the hundreds of thousands. Same with Twitter. Think about that: hundreds of thousands of people around the world knowing in an instant what you thought/saw/wore/hated/loved. But in most cases, I wouldn’t want to trade my life for theirs and I doubt you would either. Some of the people I follow, for example, work mundane jobs during the week, all the while striving to post at least six times a day. As a viewer, or voyeur I should say, I expect them to do this. I hate them and love them.
But I also want to remind us that while we may be bombarded with the images of happiness of other people on a near-constant basis, they are just that: images, constructions, snapshots. They’re not real. Real people wear stained sweat pants, feel fat and think they are the only one not invited to the party. Even the people you see on your feed.
On that self-affirming note, I’m going to go drink a bottle of water because this real person still needs to lose 23 pounds before the 1st of September – so I look good in my travel pictures.
