After my great Instagram hacking incident of 2023, I had a little anti-social media moment where I did my best to scrub the Internet clean of my presence (an unsuccessful attempt; google me and you WILL see my hacked yet seemly normal Instagram profile still floating around the cloud. Tragic). And yet, despite my eradication of Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter and even good ol’ Tumblr, I could not resist the pull of the one benevolent social media site, the one with endless pretty pictures and relative anonymity: Pinterest.
Pinterest is perfect. An endless depth of more and more of what you’re looking for. Everything is filtered just enough for my eyes to think that the golden hue is real. And it really calms me down that the edges of the photos aren’t pointy, but instead rounded, like my smooth and relaxed personality when I’m doing a heavy-duty Pinterest scroll. If someone hacks my Pinterest, I’ll blow a gasket. It’s so aesthetically pleasing, and best of all, it’s harmless. Right?
Well, when I put on my technophobe hat, I suspect we may have a budding problem on our hands.
Life on Pinterest is edited, perfectly angled and unfortunately, completely unrealistic. We make vision boards and goal collages for our computer wallpapers out of entirely unattainable visual masterpieces. Now, I’m not saying it’s wrong to have pretty vision boards; they’re supposed to be appealing to you. But I feel we might be forgetting that the goal is, for example, to exercise more, rather than to look aesthetically pleasing when doing it. Pinterest is all about how things look, and if we only use visual markers to set our goals, I hate to say it, but we’re headed down a street lined with trees of disappointment.
Life is ugly! Or, at least, a little blander than Pinterest makes it seem. Some things aren’t perfectly formatted or filtered, and never will be. Sometimes your healthy breakfast looks clumpy. Or your outfit sits weirdly on you. Or the beautiful view has an ugly building in the middle of it. Your whole life will never look like a Pinterest board, or a movie or any other curated piece of media. I think our caveman brains haven’t quite adjusted to the invention of media yet, though, so it’s important to remind ourselves of its shallowness, of the fact that it doesn’t quite present an accurate view of reality.
Once we accept that Pinterest’s visual beauty is completely unattainable, we’ll be far more capable of seeing the beauty in our day-to-day lives. We’ll be more satisfied with our appearances, our possessions, our homes. Now, I’m not saying we should quit using Pinterest; you’ll have to pry that app out of my cold, dead, cramped-from-scrolling hands. But we need to remember that Pinterest isn’t reality; it’s just pretty pictures.
By keeping this in mind during my nightly Pinterest scroll, I can prevent myself from falling into the same toxic comparison hole that most other social media sites seem to curate. I’ll no longer expect aesthetic perfection from my imperfect life. And who knows; maybe life will start to feel more rich and beautiful than any Pinterest board.