‘omg, S. you are so popular’ – a girl told me when she saw the instagram stories replies popping-up in my mobile.
i am not popular. it’s just my friends showing their love. to make sure i know i am always being taken care of.
made me think about all this superficial stuff we are all in the middle at.
– the 3.0 normals. they are over 10k in instagram. they bought their fans. they hide their likes.
– the 3.0 straight guy. he has a curated feed of girls. he gives hearts and fires to every pic. wishing at some point they will check on him.
sometimes I wonder who needs pornhub when instagram has become a form of soft-porn spam.
you enter the platform to check on your friends and instead you found the boobs of an influencer in your face.
– the 3.0 stalkers. their profile has no posts yet. but they check all the content you share. sometimes you know them and sometimes they have fake names.
– the 3.0 sexy gals. augmented boobs. augmented butts. augmented lips.
there was a moment when it was cool. because somehow it was body positivity stuff. different body shapes making the cut into the mainstream junk.
but now that everybody is into ozempic, extreme slimness is back to its peak.
15% of body fat and a 90D in your bra. it’s ok to be free and to pursue the body of our dreams.
just let’s make sure we don’t lose our own sanity in this journey full of vanity.
when you are just a 2.0 normal gal, what is our relationship with all this social media stuff?
L. was driving. ‘I haven’t invested 2 years of my life doing a prepa – CPGE – to end up with instagram fucking up my mind’, she said.
‘I don’t want to depend into others people attention as a way to get validation’, she concluded.
B. was not finding all the time she wanted for her personal life. going to the gym, reading a book, this kind of stuff.
she felt of her chair when she realised she was wasting 2 hours per day checking other’s people life.
Z. told me she doesn’t like it. ‘doesn’t feel good. makes me needy and socially anxious. I already have enough with people leaving me in read in WhatsApp to add another app’.
L. made the reflexion that her summer trip was kind of ruined because somebody she was following was sharing all the spots where she was about to be.
on the other hand, H. is very much into it. ‘do you think Hailey Bieber is beautiful?’, she asked me once. ‘I would like to be like her’.
made me think of this video I saw – in instagram – about how the happiness index of people living in that small country went down when TV arrived. the drop was even worst after the smartphones.
‘tout le monde se compare‘, A. told me. ‘c’est inevitable‘, she said.
but this comparison thing started way before than social media. it’s just that instagram made it worst: faster, more visible, more frequent, more accessible.
in my teenage years, I started buying Vogue, Elle, Superpop and Cosmopolitan.
was my way to have access to – what I thought- role models. a different source of inspiration and information.
instead, we were getting underweight supermodels in the cover, several bikini body guides and how to better dress according to your body shape.
made me think as well in how our mothers educated us.
they raised us to be the first of the class. to be smart. to be better than the other ones.
but just in case, do it without getting fat. and with fine manners.
i guess there was not bad intention. it was just their generation passing on in all the successful observations.
because beauty and femininity -whatever this means now – were the only assets they knew.
if you think about it, it’s all about the same but with different shape.
from domestic skills lessons at school a couple decades ago to how to please your men in beauty magazines before Me Too.
and here we are. a sandwich generation obsessed with not getting fat and making a life thanks to our mind.
in between, we keep on wasting some of our time comparing our bodies, wealth and social life meanwhile we do squads, we hike in Nepal and we have to be grateful to life.
it’s messy, hard to navigate and makes no sense.
might be time to do a self-exam. to rely more in the internal factors instead of the external ones.
meanwhile, i won’t delete the app. somehow is the only addiction i have. it’s allowing me to keep in touch with all the friends i have.
and i think i am finally doing something good about it sharing with you this random stuff i write.
meanwhile, I will keep briefing my fitness coach in how can i have less body fat meanwhile i keep my bra size.
because maybe, to find the middle point, you need first to be in contradiction with yourself.