Wednesday, February 3, 2016 // The Statement
6B
Social Unrest
by Haley McLaughlin, Daily Staff Photographer
My point here is that
this is a made-up world
of contrived ideas and
people.
ILLUSTRATION BY EMILIE FARRUGIA
1
1:47 p.m. on a Wednesday night. You’re
about to doze off, laid heavily upon your
twin-sized bed that leaves little room for
turning in your sleep. Despite the heaviness you feel
on your eyelids, you begin to feel around in the dark
for your phone in search of some pre-bedtime enter-
tainment. You hold your phone in your hands, hover-
ing it a safe 10 inches away from your face, and hold
on tight (mustn’t forget the numerous incidents where
you dropped it on your face and had to suffer through
the swelling sensation on your nose in the darkness).
Why is it that this has become the strange bedtime
routine of our generation?
After tiring through all of your social media, fully
caught up on how all of those people (whom you care
for so deeply) are doing, you decide to continue explor-
ing, ignoring the lingering sting behind your tired
eyes.
It is at this point that you wander into the mysteri-
ous “Explore Posts” section of Instagram, the section
where you are no longer comforted by the faces of your
friends and family, but rather subjected to a strange
compilation of pictures that Instagram believes you
might be interested in seeing. Why Instagram thinks
you might like these, you’re not so sure. Maybe these
are similar to other pictures you’ve liked recently?
Maybe these are some pictures that your friends have
been liking? Who cares? You keep on scrolling.
First, you see pictures of friends, and then pictures
of friends of friends, until finally you’re left with pic-
tures of people you’ve never met and places you’ve
never gone. At this point, it would make sense to stop.
Just go to bed — you don’t even know what you’re
looking at anymore. If only you could see yourself
— lying there alone in the middle of your small dark
room, the glow of light from your phone revealing two
tired eyes and a double chin. But it’s only 12:32 a.m.
You have time.
It is at this point in the night that things get really
dismal — because now you’ve come across Instagram’s
food accounts. It starts with a picture of mac and
cheese that comes up in your “Explore Posts” section.
You think to yourself, mm… that looks good, and sud-
denly you become very aware of the sad empty feeling
in your stomach. Then you decide to torture yourself
further, clicking on the “food porn” account’s profile
and looking through all of their pictures. Pizza, cook-
ies, burgers, ice cream, pasta, donuts, it doesn’t end.
You reach down and lay your hand upon your stomach,
wondering to yourself, when was the last time I ate? It
feels like it’s been centuries even though you know it’s
only been a few hours. You know you should either go
get a snack or just go to sleep but something is keeping
you tied to your bed, shuffling through all of these pic-
tures of melting chocolate and grilled cheeses being
pulled apart.
Your heart is full and your stomach feels emptier
than it ever has before, and then suddenly you are cat-
apulted out of this swirl of indulgence and joy when
you see a picture of a skinny 16-year-old girl in a biki-
ni on the beach, who looks like she’s having the best
damn day of her entire life. Sun-kissed and sparkling,
her body reminds you of the lean bend of a churro cov-
ered in dazzling cinnamon sugar.
The grumble in your stomach pauses, as your eyes
dart back and forth between one picture of her per-
fectly flat stomach and the other picture of chocolate
being drizzled over that disgustingly enticing choco-
late chip cookie. Who is this girl? Why has she come
here to haunt me and my hungry dreams? You begin
to spend far too much time searching through
her pictures. You don’t understand. Does she go
to school? Does she have a job? Or does she simply
spend all of her time scantily clad on a beach some-
where?
Soon your jealously for this stranger’s beauty is sud-
denly eating away at the empty feeling that, minutes
ago, you thought was coming from your stomach. You
wish you were smiling in the sunshine and wearing
cool clothes instead of eating an entire bag of Cheetos
alone in your bed. Your self-worth has all but disap-
peared into thin air and you can’t fall asleep because
you’re too busy mentally cursing this girl’s name and
the gods who made her so damn flawless in the first
place.
Kind of fucked up, right? We’re all jealous of these
strangers and their seemingly beautiful lives, and yet
we continue to torture ourselves by looking at them
and fantasizing about things that we can’t have. It’s
why people like the Kardashians have 50+ million fol-
lowers on Instagram. That’s more than 50 million peo-
ple watching these strangers taking pictures of their
bodies and saying, “Try out our new Waist Trainer! If
you want to look like us, use this healthfully unsound
device and keep praying that one day your drastically
unachievable goals will come true!”
And I’m not trying to preach the often-heard tales
of eating disorders and body dysmorphia that we are
warned of time and again. While those are severe
problems that stem from this crazy world we live in
where people like Chrissy Teigen are “foodies,” I think
sometimes that only serves to squander the argument.
My point here is that this is a made-up world of con-
trived ideas and people. Nothing is ever as it seems,
and yet we care about it so much.
I see people my age struggle for hours to try and cre-
ate the perfect profile picture, or sit around in a room
bouncing around ideas for the right caption for an Ins-
tagram. We’re all trying to top one another and con-
vince everyone that we are the ones who are the most
effortlessly beautiful and that we are the ones who had
the most fun this weekend. Happiness is measured in
numbers of “likes” and feelings of jealousy and nobody
will ever win in this game of artificial reality.