“Do it for the Gram”

Is what a teenage girl said to her frightened friend as she pushed him onto a rock towering over a glacial lake in Canada. What she meant was of course that standing on this rock with the lake in the background would make a great photo. And great these days is defined as one that would earn him a lot of likes on Instagram.

The thought of earning virtual signs of vague approval from people he did or did not know, was enough to push the boy over the edge (fortunately not literally) and he climbed on the rock and put on a brave face to hide his fear.

I have a love-hate relationship with Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. Living away from home (wherever that may be) and not being able to catch up with friends and family in person as often as I’d like to, Social Media let me still feel like I’m part of their everyday lives rather than having to wait for a bi-annual update. 

But at the same time, I often find myself less happy after looking at Social Media than before. Social Media have a tendency to dangle the happiest moments of people’s life in front of your face – especially when you’re having a Friday night in even if you were in the mood to go out. Then you scroll through pictures from fun night outs, exotic holidays and (at my age) engagements, weddings and babies. All beautiful and happy moments that I love to see and read about, but condensed into one big happy timeline, it’s hard to avoid feeling a bit down when you’re sitting at home in your PJs at 9pm. 

I’ve even caught myself spending a Friday night looking at the Instagram profiles of people I had never even met and feeling bad about myself for not eating as many experimental sushi-fusion tacos, having as many happy blurry photos of nights out or up-shots of skyscrapers in the dusk as the Account Owner.

By pure fluke, I recently met a girl who I had previously seen on Instagram. In the virtual world, she was adventurous, and smart, and witty, and casually cool, and beautiful. In real life, she was still a lot of these things, but she wasn’t the perfect filtered, edited and annotated version that she was on Instagram. She was just the unfiltered, unedited and a less carefully annotated version of her virtual self – she was lovely and what was most lovely about her was that she did not make me feel bad about being me.

Last weekend I went to a market with a couple of new friends. The market was in a very hipster part of New York and I was prepared to spend an afternoon amongst very quirky cool people sipping Mojitos while looking at the Manhattan Skyline. What I was not prepared for was the endless browsing between food stalls that sold rather unheard of food. In the end, it turned out to be small portions of really nicely decorated but very small portions of food for GenGram, who were more interested in getting the perfect shot of themselves with the Wow!ffle than actually eating the (really quite normal) waffle with vanilla ice-cream and sprinkles.

 

Happy times. Kinda. I guess.