As I entered my teenage years in high school, things about me were bound to change. I was discovering more about myself while trying not to make myself go crazy. Like most teenage girls, I was putting more emphasis on my appearance, ensuring my hair was always done, and of course, taking hours to pick out an outfit. I put so much pressure on myself to look put together everyday and if you would’ve asked me why, I wouldn’t have had an answer.
If you watched Youtubers back in the 2013-2015 era, you are probably familiar with youtubers such as Bethany Mota or Alisha Marie. Being 14 years old with no experience in doing makeup or knowing how to do cool braids to my hair, I idolized both these youtubers and wanted to be as trendy and independent as they both were. Rewinding back, things were going well for me because I was learning how to do things I normally wouldn’t have known. From trying DIY’s every weekend to wanting to buy everything they listed for their monthly favorites, I was determined to have as much of a perfect life as they were making theirs out to be. Little did I know how much this would impact me later in life.
Two years later, I was beginning to see how the beauty and fashion Youtube era was beginning to shape my personality. Oftentimes I think we forget that the perfect lives these Youtubers seem to have, are not real. Personally, I feel they did not emphasize this enough in their videos. Teenage girls were obsessing over having the perfect Instagram feed and captions for their photos, and Instagram was shifting from a place to post anything you want to a place for everyone to try to have an aesthetic feed.
Of course, similar to the feeds of Youtubers we like, in my friend group alone I was beginning to notice how much time people put into taking the perfect photo. At the time, hanging out was becoming more about taking photos together to post on the gram than anything else.
Now as I look back as a college student, I feel that Youtube culture was in part to blame for girls wanting the perfect Instagram aesthetic. They were known for being the trendiest influencers and if your feed didn’t look like theirs, you wouldn’t be considered “cool.” We have to stop comparing ourselves to these perfect lives we see on Instagram because even the influencers themselves say their lives aren’t perfect at all. Fortunately, more recently when Youtubers come out with personal videos about their reflective period, most of the time they say the happy pictures they posted were during their darkest moments.
As social media continues to play a major role in how society thinks today, I think we can all agree that we should all #makeinstagramcasualagain. We have put too much unnecessary pressure for us to have a perfect feed, and Instagram is not the way it used to be. When the app first came out, I would post the most random things and not think twice about it. Now, I spend days deciphering on whether or not I should post something. Collectively, we have to stop caring whether it fits our feed or not because it’s just a platform and not a depiction of our real lives.