Back in November, the famous Instagram model Essena O’Neill from Australia, with over 900k followers called us as a society out. She decided to quit social media (including Instagram, Youtube and Tumblr) and changed her bio on Instagram to read “Social Media Is Not Real Life.” She proceeded to delete over 2,000 photos, and the ones she kept, she went back and edited all the captions to explain what was really going on when she took that photo. This was both a brave and bold statement, coming from someone who’s entire life revolves around social media and coming from someone who girls all around the world follow for “inspiration” and aspire to be like in every sense of the word. O’Neill took a stand and stated,
“Without realising, I've spent majority of my teenage life being addicted to social media, social approval, social status and my physical appearance."
By stating this, Essena is taking the stand that social media is completely contrived in a system where your self-worth is based entirely on how many likes you get. In her new, edited captions, she elaborated on every detail of her photos and stated how staged and fake they were just so she could make herself look happy and beautiful, even when deep down inside she wasn’t feeling that way. She announced that most of her photos, she was paid to take, or that they required numerous retakes before she edited them on multiple apps and posted them to her Instagram account.
There was nothing “real” or candid about any of her posts because in reality she spent hours behind the screen trying to make her photos seem like she had the perfect life.
When it came to the different bikinis she posted, she explains they were all brand sponsored and was paid to post them. She even admits that she was posting photos exclusively because they had the sex appeal that she knew society so desperately wanted to see, even in her photos taken at the age of 16. O'Neill explains that she was blessed by genetics to have the “perfect body" by societies standards, but that didn’t make her happy. She used to use it to her advantage to gain likes of her in skimpy clothes and bikinis to look like the perfect person, but it was all what she considers delusions and deceptions. She even said that sometimes posting these photos was the only thing that made her feel good that day.
O'Neill writes in one of her captions how much she wishes she could hug her 15-year-old self, and tell her it’s not worth it to worry so much about her appearance and social media presence because she regrets how much she chose to focus on that superficial stuff instead of her true passions.
We as a society have made being an "Instagram Model" an actual profession. We’ve done this by becoming totally and completely engrossed and obsessed with our online presence and the online presence of others. She points out that everything she did was for social approval and to live up to the social expectations we have created for ourselves. In my opinion, what she’s doing is incredibly awesome. Girls who follow these accounts are under the impression that this is "REAL" life and this is what they need to be working towards, that this is #goals. As O'Neill points out, nothing that she posts on her account is realistic because it's all fake. She won as she calls it “the genetic lottery” when it comes to her body and girls should not be aspiring to be like her because so much of what she posts is a deception. Most importantly, none of it makes her happy, and girls aspiring to be like what they see on her account will not be happy either if they continue trying to be like the false self she promotes.
The moral of the story, don’t believe everything you see on social media. Go out and enjoy life without worrying about what is will look like to other people. We live in a materialistic and appearance-obsessed world, so it's important to try not to get caught up in it.
