π₯ Instagram is probably burning down your barn
Hi friend,
which social media do you think is the most harmful? If you're a journalist, you'll probably say Twitter. If you're above 40, you might say Facebook. And if you live in 2020, the answer has got to be Instagram.
I don't know about you, but I have never closed that app, thinking: "Damn, I feel fantastic about myself, my job, my apartment, my love life, my current location, my breakfast. About all of my life choices over the past 31 years, really." Nope. Not once. Because comparison is the thief of joy, as Theodore Roosevelt said when he predicted the rise of Instagram at the beginning of the 20th century. About 100 years later, Leah Finnegan found more drastic words, calling social media out for trapping us
"in a degrading circuit of commiseration, false intimacy, and narcissism, which has the capacity to simultaneously make us feel like the most important person in the world and like total shit."
π§ Charlie Gowans and Frankie Graddon also tackle the Instagram course on the first episode their brand new podcast "The Wingwoman" (a spin off to their excellent newsletter). They talk about how you can't just sit on the couch and watch TV anymore. You now sit on the couch, watch Netflix, scroll through Instagram, see all those people getting book deals, hitting the gym and getting engaged β and you wonder if you're completely failing at life because you're not doing any of those things.
Ultimately, this is why I took a break from Instagram while travelling. I just wanted to experience things without simultaneously watching 500 other people "living their best life", creating major FOMO (do the kids still say FOMO? I'm old and miserable now as we learned last week). I wanted to take pictures without thinking of captions. I wanted to be present.
I'd be lying if I said the detox was easy breezy. During the first week, my thumb kept automatically wandering to the little square where the app used to live on my screen, only to find the weather forecast. During the second week I realized that the world really doesn't miss β and hence, need β my content. My poor ego! All in all though, it was a very therapeutic, much needed experience.
I re-installed Instagram when I returned. I tell myself that as long as I work in media, I cannot completely abstain. I have to be in touch with the Zeitgeist, you know? But I also really wanted to post some holiday pictures. Am I ill? Nah. Pathetic? Possibly.
While not being on Instagram, I read BrenΓ© Brown's Book "Braving the Wilderness β The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone", in which she says something very profound about social media:
"The way we engage with social media is like fire β you can use them to keep yourself warm and nourished or you can burn down the barn. It all depends on your intentions, expectations, and reality-checking skills."
So, my detox didn't cure my Instagram addiction, but it probably saved the barn. I did a deep clean of the accounts I follow, threw out all the ones that made me feel like shit and try to use the app more consciously now. It's going so-so.
Now, if you are one of those rare Instagram resisters, I would firstly like to congratulate you on your great mental shape, and then β sorry β present some bad news. Instagram influences your life daily, whether you have an account or not. It's constantly shaping your physical surroundings.
Have you noticed that the places where you drink coffee, have dinner or have meetings are becoming more and more generic? Minimalist furniture. Mimosas and avocado toast. Vintage sofas. Monstera plants. Flat whites. It's an aesthetic homogeneity, which Kyle Chayka defines as "AirSpace" in his excellent, yet slightly dystopian, Verge piece. Places are blanding into each other because, his conclusion, social media has been successfully teaching us to "see and feel and want the same things". It's a phenomenon which is killing the aesthetic diversity of places and makes travelling much more comfortable β but really also kind of pointless.
Phew. Still with me? Or are you scrolling through Instagram already? Ok, let's lighten the mood with monothematic #popculturepleasures.
πΊ The theme: Netflix dropped season two of Sex Education! Loved the first season, am ready to marry the second one. It's such a brilliant, colorful show, which I wish existed when I was a teenager. It's gloriously funny, yet sensibel, "playing the sex for laughs and the search for intimacy as something serious, good and noble". The cast is absolutely fabulous, Mikael Persbrandt's ravishing blue eyes simply cannot go unmentioned and I was heartbroken when the whole thing ended after only eight episodes.
π§ Not willing to let go after these few episodes, I scanned the podcast world for some behind-the-scenes insights and these two episodes really hit the spot:
The magnificent Gilian Anderson talks to Krista Smith at Present Company about her role as sex therapist Jean Milburn, about her fight for equal pay while she played "Scully" on The X-Files and β coincidentally β about the impact of social media.
Asa Butterfield (Otis) and Emma Mackey (Maeve) appear on Must Watch and chat about whether there were awkward moments on set, how they'd explain the show to their grandmother and I definitely have a girl crush on Emma now.
This is it for today, so, I guess, see you on Insta? π€·πΌββοΈ
Have a lovely week,
Anna
πPS: I'm organizing a little book swap party (take one, leave on, or ten) in Hamburg on February 16th. If you're a fellow book worm and would like to come, send me a message!