My Insta Life

 

DISCLAIMER: If you were looking for some sort of poignant yet amusing article this week, you ain’t getting it. You are about to read an account of a s@#t storm of ridiculous.

Let’s begin…

Have you wondered what it would be like to carefully curate your life through social media posts that highlight your almost sociopathic confidence and blinding narcissism? You know, just go all out as shamelessly as possible to let others know how absolutely amazing and enlightened you are?

Yeah, it has probably never crossed your mind. It hadn’t crossed mine either. Then my friends and I started a conversation about the extreme types of self-proclaimed Insta stars.

We wondered what it would be like living with absurdly delusional confidence and self-importance. What would it be like to spend every day ensuring everyone knew how fantastic you were through Instagram posts?

Ahhh a challenge was proclaimed! For one week I would live the life of an Insta narcissist, who would take every waking moment to remind everyone how amazing and confident I am.

I wouldn’t be takings pictures of my food or anything else other than my fabulous self, accompanied by captions boasting my fantastic-ness!

This is how my week went…

The first step was developing a character. Since I tend to be a pretty low key, ultra casual, sweat pants kind of person I needed some guidance. So I looked towards the holy family of talentless self centred-ness, the Kardashian/Jenner clan. I could feel their wave of vapid-ness crash upon me and I soaked it in. I also scanned through some TikTok videos to see what the Gen Z’s were all about…ummm…why do those 15-year-olds all look magazine cover ready? My teen years were rough.

Anyway, along with some other videos of influencers who spend their time hawking mantras of self-worth and a crash course in what “touch-up” Instagram filters would not short circuit trying to cover my freckles I was set.

So every day I curated a series of ridiculous posts for my fans aka my five best friends, which I sent to them on our WhatsApp group.

You didn’t really think I was actually going to post that absurdity online did you?

I am pretty sure people would think I was having some sort of mental breakdown.

To fill you in on how deeply self centred I went, I made a Father’s Day video post where I stated that if it wasn’t for me, my father, my husband would not be fathers.

Therefore the day should be spent celebrating me; I had my children make me Father’s Day cards and proclaimed that ensuring I was celebrated was all a normal part of knowing my self-worth.

Regarding photo posts, I put on a sparkly gold party dress and the jewelled stilettoes one morning, took about 100 full body mirror shots before I settled on the right one and captioned something like “Uh I don’t understand why stay at home mothers dress so basic! I shine every day! #confidence #killingit.”

There was also a super awkward photo of me posing on a questionable branch of my mango tree with a caption about not having to pick mangos because they fall from the highest branches when faced with my beauty.

I was beginning to scare myself. Luckily the week is over.

So what was it like to live in a bubble of narcissism? Well…

The pros

1. Girl Can Slay! I was never one for selfies, being naturally photogenic isn’t one of my talents. However thanks to “Living for the gram” I learned how to semi nail them. It’s all about your angles and knowing which filters accentuate your inner glam goddess.
2. Confidence! I must admit it was difficult to constantly talk about myself in such high regard. I tend to think of myself as the queen of self depreciating humour, so this was way out of my comfort zone. However, I will tell you this, after constantly boasting about my greatness I actually started to believe it. I wasn’t at the point of self delusion, but a few more weeks and I may have gotten there.
3. Vacation Time! In my bubble of ME! ME! ME! I easily ignored the social and political dumpster fire around me. I lost track of the news, what I did read or watch I could easily dismiss to deep recesses of my mind, and focus on my newest obsession…ME!

The Cons

1. I’m exhausted. Being amazing and better than everyone else is time consuming. From taking perfectly posed pics or recording absurdly overly confident video posts, editing them, making sure they are always 100% is hard work.

Whether it’s zipping into a gown for five minutes or applying an unusual amount of makeup in the middle of the day to ensure my post is extra, is frankly exhausting and honestly a waste of time.

Look pass my sweatpants and dry shampoo, I’m done.

2. It’s emotionally consuming. It happened rather rapidly. By the second day I was consumed with planning my next post. Mentally planning my visual and matching caption. I felt it was my responsibility to entertain my friends and the responses I got from them was addictive. Every night before bed my mind was flooded with plans for tomorrow’s mock Insta amazing post, it was bad.

One day I was extremely busy, and genuinely had no time to create a post. I felt guilty. I felt as though I was letting my fans…I mean friends down. I was heading down a dark path.

3. It’s terrifying to be so self centred. When you spend all of your energy focused totally on yourself it’s easy to ignore the issues of the world around and that’s extremely scary. When your total focus is on yourself, you lose a huge part of your humanity. You lose your ability to empathize and it makes you generally horrible. I’ve come to believe that this is a huge part of what is wrong with the world. So many of us have simply become to self involved to care about others and therefore we turn a blind eye to those who need our help, our advocacy, and our voices.

Honestly I’m happy that nightmare of a week is over. I’m just not configured to be Insta amazing 24/7.

So excuse me while I read the newspapers, put on some leggings and throw my phone away.