The social media parallel of the “no-makeup makeup look” is the Instagram photo dump. While it may seem so effortless and casual, these pictures are arguably harder to perfect than your typical posed ones. Behind every good photo is a hundred others that look nearly identical, except for some indiscernible detail that’s only noticeable to the person in them. At the risk of this being yet another critique about the pitfalls of social media, I urge us all to deprioritize it in our lives and reevaluate what exactly we’re using it for.
Social media is not inherently a bad thing. Its primary purpose was to share moments with our friends and make doing so more accessible, but somehow during the evolution of micro-influencers and aesthetic Instagram feed themes and, of course, the elusive perfect photo dump, that meaning got a little lost. Nowadays social media can feel a little performative on the good days and blatantly fake on the bad. Are we posting for ourselves, to create a little place on the Internet to harbor our memories? Or are we posting idealized, unrealistic versions of ourselves to appease our followers, who maybe we think care more than they actually do?
Taking social media off the pedestal it’s been held to for our most formative years is easier said than done. When you grow up relying on Instagram likes for validation, you end up combing through your life events looking for something you can post to get them. Social media is an institution of our modern society that cannot be so easily dismantled, but maybe we don’t need a whole dismantling for there to be positive change.
As individuals, we cannot change what other people do or how they think. The only thing we have power over is ourselves, but with that singular power, we can completely change our perspectives on the world and things like social media. Let fun moments be exactly that — fun in the moment, without worrying about the lighting or how your hair looks or what you’re wearing. Treat the good makeup or outfit days like any other day because you always look good anyway — you don’t need likes to tell you that. There will always be something to post, so redirect that energy you may have used to spend looking for them into simply being present.
The quality of your life cannot be determined by its Instagrammability. There is more to your experiences, to all of our experiences, than what is shown in a handful of pictures on the Internet and the sooner we internalize this and actually consume social media with this perspective, the sooner we can stop feeling like we need to perform our lives for other people. By all means, you can still snap a picture, preserve a moment, but make sure to go on and live in it.