Yet if we’re honest with ourselves, today for most of us is made up of many ordinary moments—not Instagram moments. Yes, there are some of those, but getting up in the morning is rarely, if ever, a picturesque moment. Neither is eating breakfast, nor taking the kids to school. Neither is answering e-mails from coworkers, nor brushing our teeth. That’s not to speak of the bad moments: the despair, the failures, and the hardships. Those moments are rarely posted.
The effects of Instagram on mental health have been well documented.1 Instagram use is associated with higher levels of anxiety, FOMO (fear of missing out), and loneliness. Of course, you can’t attribute these feelings just to browsing Instagram. It’s likely that we browse Instagram when we’re feeling lonely, and so there’s not necessarily a cause-and-effect relationship. Instagram and services like it, however, have given rise, especially among younger generations, to dissatisfaction with the ordinary. As perfect lives made up of perfect moments constantly enter our minds, we feel like we don’t measure up.2
Why is that? There’s a conflict that occurs between our expectation of what things ought to be like (Instagram) and what they’re really like (real life). Our expectations for life shift and change as we view images of other people’s best moments. We come to believe in a subliminal way that the extraordinary, perfect life in the here and now is ideal and achievable, and the monotony and struggle of ordinary life is drab and worthless. We want our ordinary life to be extraordinary all of the time. But, as we all know, that’s not real life. The very definition of extraordinary requires the existence of the ordinary. Extraordinary things are a deviation from the ordinary. Instagram gives the impression that it’s possible to have the extraordinary without any ordinary at all.
