14
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Why do people follow social media from those presenting a perfect life when it makes them feel inadequate?
I've never been one to follow much social media - certainly not the kind that is just a (almost certainly fake) presentation of a perfect life. Someone's highlight reel. But I did catch myself on the other side of this. I spent hours on some days baking or cooking specifically to flex on people with well-crafted photos of the finished food. I still enjoyed it, but once I realized what I was doing I started cooking much more reasonably difficult dishes - so I'm sure it was motivated by a wish to instill envy in others.
So I think I understand that side of the equation. But I had a more or less captive audience (a Slack #food channel). Can anyone speak from the side of the willing consumer? The avid subscriber?
Probably for the same reasons people watch aspirational TV shows; because it allows us to live vicariously through others, temporarily escaping the depressing reality of our own lives, while also giving us something to aspire to. Which is also why aspirational advertising is so effective too, since it convinces us that if only we had X, Y or Z products or services, we could be just as successful, happy, etc. as all the people shown in the ads.
See: Charley Brooker's take on the phenomena.
p.s. Just to be clear, I am not looking down on people for the above, as I watch the occasional bit of aspirational TV too, am not immune to aspirational advertising, and I also often rely on escapism in order to cope as well. It's just that my personal drug of choice for escapism is playing video games and reading scifi/fantasy novels, not following Instagram influencers. But, to each their own.
As of 2 months ago, no, I wouldn't be able to relate. I was a confident, secure, happy guy who had a great marriage and was perfectly content with my life. I had a facebook, but I logged in maybe once or twice a year. I wanted to delete it, but my wife wanted me to keep it so we could coordinate events with friends.
2 months ago, my life got completely flipped on it's head. I'm going through a divorce right now and I'm no longer the same person I was back then.
I find myself browsing social media a LOT more now. I view my friend's feeds, I post stuff for likes, I reach out to old friends/exes. I honestly think it all comes down to insecurity. A lot of people absolutely cannot admit they're insecure, or they don't realize they are. I can definitely compare the person I was to the person I am and clearly identify that it's insecurity that makes me do that stuff. It's desperation for any kind of human connection or validation. You kinda feel like you're connected to your acquaintances by browsing their photos. You can imagine yourself in a picture of a fun night out, or on a luxury vacation, or at the gym.
Ultimately it's sort of like junk food though. It makes you feel just rotten afterwards.
I find myself doing that a bit with story based games (oddly, Afterparty & Oxenfree, if you know them). Something like "that looks fun/interesting/cool" to have a social life and connections like that even though that's absolutely not who I am in real life and actually the situations in these stories are very horrible. But I can imagine myself being there!
It's nice to look at nice things, beautiful things, interesting things; things that we will most likely never have.
It's cool to see what people who are talented at something are capable of doing! For cooking, it might inspire me to try making something close to that dish.
I'm curious why you would describe what you did as "presenting a perfect life" because I would not say what you did is that. You presented a display of cooking talent. That doesn't say anything about the rest of your life or really anything beyond "hey, the cooked this thing that looks really good". I guess I bring that distinction up because I think there is a world of difference between people who are followed for a specific talent/skill vs people who are followed for their lifestyle. In my mind, to fit what you described, you would have to be posting in the #food channel pictures of all your great food and also bragging about how delicious it was and how you cook like this for every meal and about how much better cooking makes your life. Posting pictures of accomplishments isn't the same IMO. I follow and watch videos of video game streamers, but I don't think those tell me anything about the person's quality of life, they tell me about how well they play the game and how they strategize and think about things. I follow a bunch of really talented tattoo artists from around the world that I'll never get the opportunity to get tattoo'd by, but I don't follow them because of their idealize life, I follow them because they do tattoo good. I bring this up because there definitely are influencers who are famous for presenting an ideal perfect version of their lives, but I think what you described is a different type of content creation.
I was also traveling at the time (in what I consider to be a covid-responsible manner). That was occasionally obvious from the photos.
I was posting very often.
At the time I even admitted I was trying to make people jealous. I didn’t stop until I heard someone else describe the phenomenon in themselves and I realized I didn’t like what I heard.