Last week, I found myself paddling a boat around a lake in Los Angeles. I’m not generally the sort of person who paddles boats around lakes—I don’t like being outside that much; whatever—but my girlfriend thought it would be romantic, and after she suggested that it would also help tone my arms, I agreed. To my surprise, I was really enjoying it. It was peaceful, relaxing, and it was kind of romantic, albeit in a very obvious way. But then I got a text, and, after checking it, I autopilot-opened Instagram and began to scroll. My stream was full of images—of both celebrities and friends of mine—at the Cannes Film Festival, dressed up in fancy clothes, on fantastically saturated beaches, taking quirky selfies with Cara Delevingne. Suddenly, I was no longer having fun: Why was I on this stupid paddleboat on this lackluster lake wearing this unflattering life jacket from hell? My girlfriend yelled at me to put my phone away, but the damage had already been done.
This might sound melodramatic, but Instagram makes me feel depressed. More than any other form of social media, Instagram seems specifically about comparison—an endless competition of whose life is better. How can one ever be truly satisfied when, right there in your phone, lies an endless stream of photographic evidence that tons of people are having more fun, and are more successful, wealthier, skinnier, and more in love than you are? It’s an instant insecurity inducer, evidenced by the fact that we all look at our own Instagram feeds even more than we look at other people’s. (Don’t even try to deny it.) “Am I funny? Am I hot?” we wonder as we stare at the grid of thumbnails that amounts to our life. Sometimes I scroll through my feed, imagining that I’m someone else, trying to rate myself as a neutral second party—a valuable way to spend an afternoon! Or sometimes I’ll stare at my profile and have deep thoughts like, “I’ve been using lots of bluish filters lately. What does that say about me as a person?”
This obsession with comparison can be particularly toxic when it comes to our romantic lives. It’s not just other couples’ love lives we compare our own to, but also the love lives of former lovers. Case in point: a guy I used to date, with whom it never really worked out, recently started seeing someone new—a model, of course! Naturally, I looked through all the photos she’d ever posted, thinking, “Is she really that much prettier than me?” and “How successful is she actually?” When I reached the end of her stream, feeling royally bad about myself, I moved on to her tagged photos, in order to get a more “accurate” (read: unflattering) perspective of what she looks like, desperate for one double-chin shot to make myself feel confident again. I found no bad angles, no fashion disasters, no sign of crow’s feet; I did, however, find that this pointless, compulsive masochism made me feel all the more pathetic.
My friend Petra Collins, a 21-year-old artist, feels my pain. “Instagram is the worst for relationships,” she told me. “It can drive me insane if I let it. Sometimes I go into a black hole—I hardcore lurk whoever I’m interested in, to the point where I start freaking out about what and whose photos they’re liking. Or I’ll think, ’Why are they not texting me back when I can see they’re liking photos? Obvi you’re on your phone.’ I’ve deleted the app so many times.” Petra also has a pet peeve for people who post too many relationship photos. “I just think it’s annoying,” she said. “Posting photos of your relationship is like posting photos of babies, or a pet that isn’t a puppy or a kitten—no one cares.”
And yet, most of us do it anyway. There’s emerged a sort of etiquette for how to approach Instagram in a relationship. Following a breakup, there’s an unspoken grace period where one should not Instagram a new lover, for the sake of the ex’s sanity. But people often break this rule, maliciously. And please tell me I’m not the only one who’s had the embarrassing “Why don’t you Instagram me more?” fight with a partner? If, over a certain period, I’m ’gramming my girlfriend a lot and she’s not reciprocating, it feels significant. I start to wonder, “Is she no longer into this? Is she trying to create the image of being single?”
Interestingly, Petra says she can look back through her Instagram and pinpoint times when she was happy or sad. “I think I selfie more when I’m depressed,” she said. “Sometimes I post photos of myself when I’m sad to make myself feel better, which is so tragic, but you know, I just need that little bit of kindness.” Tragic, maybe, but we’ve all been there: we’re validation addicts. And while Petra doesn’t blame social media for making her feel depressed—she’s been dealing with depression since she was young—she says it definitely allows her to indulge in her sadness more.
So why, if I have what by most measures would be considered a “good life,” can something like Instagram have me feeling so unsatisfied and sad? Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel Prize–winning psychologist at the forefront of research on happiness, and who has a wildly popular TED Talk on the subject, argues that there are two kinds of contentment. First, there’s the day-to-day type of happiness—a measure of how good you feel, and what your mood is like on a moment-to-moment basis as you go through life. And then there’s a more reflective type of happiness, which is a measure of how satisfied you are with your place in the world and what you’ve achieved, when you really stop to think about it. These two things are not always in sync, Kahneman says. Just because you’re a mostly upbeat person doesn’t mean that you’re satisfied with your life, and vice versa. It’s these two forms of happiness, he says, which combine to make up your overall wellbeing.
Right now, I’m pretty OK with where my life is at, in a big-picture way. But my day-to-day is questionable. I don’t want to sound like an out-of-touch mom, blaming social media for all that’s wrong in the world, but I’m beginning to feel like the constant compare-athon of Instagram is having a negative effect on my day-to-day happiness, lowering the score of my overall well-being.
That’s the funny thing about comparison: It makes you feel bad a lot more often than it makes you good. Looking at a photo of a model can make me feel ugly, but finding flaws in my ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend certainly doesn’t make me feel any better. It’s like that epically profound quote from Mean Girls: “Calling somebody else fat won’t make you any skinnier. Calling someone stupid doesn’t make you any smarter. And ruining Regina George’s life definitely didn’t make me any happier.” Oh, Tina Fey, how wise you are!
The obvious question is: If Instagram makes me feel bad, why don’t I just delete it? I ask myself this on a daily basis, and I always come to the same conclusion: social media is probably ruining my life, but at this point, without it, it’s almost like I wouldn’t have a life. Such is the nature of modern life. With social media, we paint a picture of what we want our lives to look like—it’s a highly curated, and largely fraudulent (or at best incomplete), version of ourselves. So it’s important to remember that when we measure ourselves up to others online, what we’re comparing ourselves to isn’t real; it’s more of an aspirational version of lives and relationships, fabricated by people who, in reality, are probably just as unsatisfied, depressed and insecure as the rest of us.
Karley Sciortino writes the blog Slutever. Read her most recent post, “The Post-Relationship Crutch: When Sleeping with Your Ex Becomes a Cock Block.”
Hair: Joey George; Makeup: Morgane Martini
On Sciortino: Marni top
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