aspiring

and my love/hate relationship with social media

I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with social media and when I say "social media", I am referring specifically to Instagram. That is really the only platform I use, and I do enjoy it most of the time. But there are aspects of it that are bothersome and one of those aspects as it relates to me specifically is this concept of aspiring.

Aspiring definition: directing one's hopes and ambitions toward becoming a specified type of person. Instagram as a platform is a breeding ground for aspirational wants. "Want to lose weight and fit into skinny jeans? Follow this perfect looking person!" "Want to travel more? Follow this person who makes a living travelling to all these places and people pay her to do it!" "Want to (insert here)? Follow this person!!!!!!!" You get the drift. Slowly but surely, we start following people who we aspire to be or look like or want some aspect of their life without really asking ourselves if that is what we truly want.

I am not immune to this type of encroachment. I realized this last year when I was trying to figure out how to spend less time on Instagram itself. The whole app had been bothering me truth be told. The ads, the influencers peddling nonsense. People trying to grow their accounts honestly and failing. The sameness of everything. The feeling of this "need" to constantly check in and see what is going on. I was trying to figure out why I was on this app & why it seemed so important. So, I decided to take a hard look at who I was following and why.

About a year ago, one of the things I realized is that I was following a lot of people who garden and can their harvest. Hmmm.... Why was I following these people? I admired what they are doing and am not taking anything away from that amazing feat of accomplishment, but I will never do this. I was aspiring to be someone who cans their food. Never mind my intense fear of botulism, this is just something that in my life today, I had no desire to do. So why was I following intensely, what these people were doing? I don't want to can my own tomatoes or make my own jam. It sounds interesting but I really don't want to do that. Why were these people and their daily garden exploits in my feed?

Maybe I was feeling this need to do it somehow because I am a homemaker? Could be. Do I just admire what they are doing? Maybe. But this type of gardening super-ninja is someone I don't want to be. And spending copious amounts of my everyday life invested in whether or not they have enough veg to do all their canning was not making sense mathematically to me. I needed my time back. So, I hit the unfollow button.

I want to say here, that there is absolutely nothing wrong with following accounts simply for the sheer beauty of it. Plenty of people follow gardening accounts, to use my example above, and have absolutely no intention of growing their own food. And that is perfectly fine. But the difference here is that they know that, whereas I did not. I wasn’t following these accounts to behold the joy of growing your own cucumber. I was following these accounts because I thought that was something my aspiring-self wanted. That there was a part of me that wanted to dig in the dirt and make something from nothing. My realizations changed my views. This was not something I wanted, in any form, therefore the notion of continuing to immerse myself in these accounts, no longer made sense.

This concept of "aspiring" is still something that I continue to work on. Every once in a while, I check in with myself and see how I feel when I am using Instagram. Do I feel fine, or do I feel worse after being on the app? I check in with the list of who I follow and see if these accounts are ones that I am truly interested in. For me personally, to spend time on that app, I really have to do this check-in often. When I am taking the time to look at someone’s photos, reels, videos, etc.…, this is time that I could be doing something else and so I need to make sure that what I am following has value for me. I make a conscious decision every time I am on that app to purposely be on there.

Life, real life, is what happens off of those squares. I like Instagram but it can definitely pull you in and there is more to our days in the here and now than constantly scrolling. I want to make sure that if I am spending time on that app, that it is for the right reasons. I don't want to aspire to look like someone else. I want to look like me. I don't want the perfect home. I want my home with books on the kitchen table and Paw Patrol toys strewn about on the floor.

How do you handle Instagram or other forms of social media?