5⭐️5⭐️5

Instagram teaches young women to feel irresistible while making them REPULSIVE to young men. It has convinced millions of young women that they are supermodels, international celebrities and luxury brands, when in reality they are simply narcissists staging an endless advertising campaign for their own mediocrity. Every outing becomes a photoshoot. Every restaurant becomes a studio. Every holiday becomes a publicity campaign. Every boyfriend becomes an unpaid photographer whose primary responsibility is to document the extraordinary existence of his girlfriend. You go to a museum? Wonderful. Ten minutes admiring the paintings, forty minutes photographing her on the staircase. You go to a concert? Excellent. The musician is merely providing the soundtrack for her latest Instagram story. You visit Rome? Forget the Roman Empire. The principal attraction is a woman posing in front of the Colosseum as though two thousand years of European history had culminated in the production of her holiday photographs. And the boyfriend? Poor bastard. He stands there holding her handbag, taking the same photograph seventeen times because her left shoulder looks slightly different in the previous sixteen. He has become the technical department of a one-woman advertising agency that sells absolutely nothing of value. What makes the phenomenon particularly grotesque is that Instagram does not even require its users to develop an interesting personality. There is practically no room for sustained argument, serious writing or intellectual exploration. The platform rewards images, instant reactions, fashionable slogans and carefully manufactured impressions. Why have an original thought when you can repost a ready-made slogan about being a strong, independent woman? A little feminism. A little spirituality. A little therapy vocabulary. Some fashionable political indignation. A declaration about knowing one's worth. The commercial dimension makes the whole thing even more absurd. The account becomes a catalogue of products, restaurants, hotels, cosmetics, clothes and destinations. The individual herself becomes the principal item on display. She is simultaneously the unpaid advertisement subcontractor, the advertisement and the advertised product. This also creates a peculiar market for relationships. A boyfriend is no longer merely a companion. He is also a photographer, travel sponsor, logistical assistant and provider of experiences suitable for public exhibition. The relationship becomes a succession of opportunities for producing content. Dinner is not dinner until it has been photographed. A holiday is not a holiday until it has been published. A romantic gesture is not sufficiently romantic unless an audience has witnessed it. There is something transactional about this arrangement. Affection is expenditure and social prestige becomes a measure of romantic success. At the extreme, the boundary between presenting oneself as a desirable partner and marketing one's attractiveness as a commodity becomes remarkably thin. And then comes the psychological damage. The result can be a peculiar combination of insecurity and narcissism. The ego expands while self-confidence deteriorates. Instagram is a machine that makes people dissatisfied with themselves and then encourages them to spend their lives advertising themselves. Ordinary existence begins to feel insufficient. An evening without photographs becomes a wasted opportunity. A restaurant without fashionable decoration becomes uninteresting. A relationship without public validation becomes disappointing. What was once called showing off has become personal branding. They do not simply use Instagram to document their existence. They begin organising their existence around Instagram.