Over the last two years, I have found a new appreciation for the Pinterest app.
Dried flowers, bows in the hair, gold jewelry, minimalist tattoos, cups of coffee, fall outfits, all of it makes me feel so inspired and excited to take these ideas into my life.
In my bouts with Instagram, I have come to have a love-hate with the app. It does not stay on my phone for long, and when it does, it is because of certain jobs and activities that all go through social media. But throughout my realizations with Instagram, I have used Pinterest more often than the average 20-year-old would.
I find myself wondering if Pinterest is Instagram for those who feel like they cannot relate to the social demand of Instagram. Or if the media on Pinterest is stuff that one consumes when they feel like they have outgrown Instagram.
Don’t get me wrong, Pinterest still has the underlying tones of comparison and materialism that Instagram has. But in some way, I feel much more hopeful and sane about myself spending 10 minutes on Pinterest, instead of 10 minutes on Instagram. It is a weird realization that I would much rather look at possible dinner ideas for myself than what Kim Kardashian had for dinner.
This is why I love it so much! Instagram claims to be personalizable when in reality it is just a marketing tool to get us more involved with the app. Instagram claims you can personalize your own pictures, your stories, and the people you follow. But it is not actually for your own personalization if you are met with a constant feed of comparison and negativity, even if you don’t seek it out.
How Pinterest differs is with its automatic feed reset. Sometimes this setting is annoying. I have looked up Halloween crafts before and it took a while before my feed did not consist of small ghost and spider cut-outs.
But this setting has the users’ best interests in mind. I would much rather have Halloween cut-outs than some airbrushed model that will make me feel funny in the clothes I wear for the next week. Instagram has had many accusations of purposely flooding users with unhealthy material. Content that furthers, body dysmorphia, depression and eating disorders. Even if you think that you are managing your feed well, there is a chance that there will be something that you don’t want to see anyways.
In my experience with my Pinterest feed, anything I don’t want to see; I don’t. Plus, Pinterest is an app for solely creative content, not actual social updates of people and their lifestyles that we see for a split second which end up affecting us for way longer than a split second. Maybe what we need to stop the toxicity of Instagram is more activity on Pinterest. I mean it makes sense to better free our minds from the comparison and create innovativeness for ourselves.