BeReal burned bright, fizzled fast, and still managed to make us panic pose. A hot take on spontaneity, performance anxiety, and aestheticised honesty.
When BeReal dropped into our lives, it promised chaos in its purest form. One notification a day. Two cameras. No filters. No drafts. No time to emotionally prepare. Just vibes, ceilings, sandwiches, and whatever existential spiral you happened to be mid bite when the alert hit.
It was marketed as the anti aesthetic platform. The digital detox girlie. The messy bun of social media. And for about five glorious minutes, it worked. People posted laundry piles. Grey skies. Half faces. Blurry bus rides. Group study rooms that smelled like caffeine and regret. It felt revolutionary in a world shaped by curated feeds on Instagram and hyper edited perfection.
Then something shifted. Suddenly we were holding phones at flattering angles. Waiting the full two minutes for better lighting. Subtly rearranging desks. Closing laptops with suspicious urgency. Deleting and reposting. Developing emotional strategies around a supposedly effortless app.
Which begs the question that lives rent free in my frontal lobe:
If you are trying this hard to be real, is it still real?
BeReal might have been the fastest app to go from cultural darling to digital tumbleweed, but its legacy lingers in the form of sweaty palms and philosophical dread every time a platform promises authenticity.
Because apparently even spontaneity can be stage managed.
Why spontaneity somehow turned into a competitive sport.
Let us talk about the greatest plot twist of our generation. Give us an app that claims to reward unfiltered honesty and we will immediately turn it into the Hunger Games.
The entire premise of BeReal was that you could not overthink it. No editing suite. No scheduled posts. No thirty take carousel shoot. Just click and go. But the human brain saw a rule set and said, marvellous, I will now optimise this to a terrifying degree.
People learned their best accidental angles. Memorised which side of their face survived fluorescent lighting. Developed reflexes sharper than Olympic sprinters. Some of us could launch that camera in 0.5 seconds flat like we were defusing a bomb made of judgement.
The wildest part is that nobody explicitly told us to compete. There was no leaderboard for most effortless existence. But social comparison is baked into every platform that lets you scroll through other people’s lives. When your mate looks mysteriously radiant while doing coursework and you resemble a Victorian child with scurvy, the brain starts negotiating.
Suddenly authenticity becomes aspirational. We are not just being real. We are being real well.
And that is where performance anxiety creeps in wearing a hoodie labelled casual. You start thinking about how your life looks when interrupted. Whether your background implies productivity or chaos. Whether your snack choice says personality. Whether your face suggests inner peace or mild despair.
You are no longer just living. You are pre packaging your living for surprise inspection.
Which is hilarious and tragic and deeply on brand for a generation raised on metrics. We grew up with likes, views, streaks, and saves. Of course we turned rawness into a genre. Of course we developed a visual language for authenticity. Of course we started contouring our emotional state.
BeReal did not fail because the idea was bad. It struggled because the audience was trained to perform long before it arrived.
What BeReal exposed about us, algorithms, and aestheticised honesty.
If BeReal was an experiment, the results were… uncomfortably revealing. It showed that authenticity is not a setting you toggle on. It is something that gets warped the second it is quantified.
Even without heavy algorithms pushing certain faces to the top, people still watched whose posts got reactions. Who looked effortlessly cool while doing nothing. Who managed to be boring in an aspirational way. We were running micro studies in our heads about relatability versus attractiveness versus chaos.
There is also something deeply philosophical about trying to look authentic on command. Real life is messy because it unfolds at inconvenient times. But when an app schedules your mess for you, it becomes semi choreographed. You might not know when the notification will drop, but you know it will. That alone changes behaviour. You sit a little straighter. You keep the desk moderately tidy. You live with half an eye on the possibility of being perceived.
That is not deception. That is surveillance culture with pastel branding.
And this is where the whole thing starts to feel like a funhouse mirror reflecting bigger internet truths. Platforms constantly ask us to be vulnerable, open, raw, transparent. But they also reward aesthetics, humour, neat narratives, and digestible pain. You learn quickly which types of honesty travel well and which sink quietly into the feed.
So yes, people joked about BeReal becoming BeFake. But the joke lands because it pokes at something structural. When platforms turn life into content, even sincerity becomes a product category.
Which leads us to the existential question nobody wanted to confront while eating instant noodles in pyjamas. What even is authenticity when you are framing it.
Are you less real because you moved to better lighting. Are you fake for not posting the meltdown and only the recovery snack. Are you allowed privacy on an app built around interruption.
The answer is murky. And that murkiness is exactly why the platform fascinated us for a hot minute before we quietly wandered off to the next dopamine dispenser.
How to look effortless in 0.5 seconds without losing your mind.
Look. If the internet insists on ambushing us daily, we might as well survive with dignity and decent angles. Here are your emotionally responsible, slightly unhinged, but lovingly practical tips for handling spontaneous posting without spiralling.
First. Accept mediocrity. Radical concept. Revolutionary. Sometimes you are going to look like a thumb. Sometimes your background will be a pile of laundry shaped like unresolved issues. Post it anyway or do not. Both are valid. Authenticity includes opting out.
Second. Pick a neutral zone. Many BeReal veterans quietly kept one corner of their room permanently acceptable. Not immaculate. Just… socially survivable. A plant. A lamp. A wall that does not scream crisis.
Third. Breathe before clicking. Half a second of oxygen does wonders for facial expressions. You do not need to smoulder. You just need to look like a person who exists.
Fourth. Remember your audience is mostly their own worst critic. They are too busy wondering if they look weird to deeply analyse your cereal choice.
And finally. Interrogate why you feel stressed at all. If a supposedly fun app makes you anxious, you are allowed to disengage. That is not failure. That is boundaries with Wi Fi.
The most authentic move in the algorithmic age might be refusing to perform when you are tired.
Which honestly feels punk.
Authenticity is not a timer, it is a relationship with being seen.
BeReal’s rise and wobble taught us something uncomfy but important. We do not just use platforms. We bring years of digital conditioning with us wherever we go. Even into spaces that promise freedom from polish. Even into apps that swear they are different.
Our generation wants honesty. Deeply. Desperately. But we also grew up learning how to package ourselves for consumption, and those instincts do not switch off because a notification told us to hurry.
So maybe the problem was never that BeReal became BeFake. Maybe the real story is that authenticity in public has always been complicated. We curate. We conceal. We choose which parts of ourselves are safe to broadcast. That does not make us liars. It makes us human navigating a world that keeps asking for content.
If the app fades, the questions remain. Who are we when nobody is watching. Who are we when everyone is. And how much of ourselves do we owe the feed.
In the meantime, post the messy desk. Or do not. Take the photo. Or close the app. Let your life breathe outside the frame.
That might be the real flex.
For more such articles, visit Her Campus at MUJ. And if you too always had the worst BeReal shots, you’d probably vibe with my other articles — Niamat Dhillon at HCMUJ.