As you can tell from the title, I am frustrated by the constantly evolving world of Instagram. I stand for the memes, the funny videos and awesome content, but the recent thread pages that come up on my explore page outright enrage me. Before I get ahead of myself, let me start from the beginning.
If you're not familiar with Instagram, or if you are and don't know what I'm talking about, let me explain. Recently there has been an influx in thread pages, probably run by teenagers. They usually have a celebrity photo as the profile pic or a cute photo of a model girl in sunglasses with the sun hitting her face. In their bio, they have something mentioning self-love and care as well as a link to a product that they're paid to advertise. And usually the names of these pages have something along the lines of 'selfcare' in them.
I don't mind that these teenagers are running thread pages, I could care less. But what triggers me to react to them are the content of these thread posts. They always have some model-looking tumblr-esque girl or aesthetic as the pictures and a caption like, "One Week Glow-Up Challenge" or "How to get a Boyfriend."
Maybe not all the content is formatted in that way, but most of them are and it's quite problematic. The biggest problem with this kind of content is how reductionist it is toward emotional and mental hardships that teenagers may face, or any small issue that they're trying to address. I know for a fact these posts can't solve my problems just because they claim they will and yet, there are over hundreds of thousands of followers on these pages.
Being a teenager is not easy, especially since the creation of social media, and especially with the lack of understanding of maintaining healthy relationships with these platforms for these digital natives. Yet, these kinds of pages only play into the cyclical harmful process of 'growing up' for these teenagers.
These pages impose a certain aesthetic and a certain way of living onto teenagers who want to be 'cool' or be 'trendy.' It's not nurturing, or harboring any type of creativity or diversity by following different lives. They simply tell people having a boyfriend is cool, you should get one, but if you're still single, it's ok because 'you get the whole bed to yourself.'
Most of the things written on the threads involve a great deal of writing the same thing over and over and over again. It's simply a waste of time for the reader and the person creating these threads: the written content tends to be common sense (or complete nonsense) as well. I'm left wondering why I should be told by a teenager whom I don't know out there to 'drink water' to be prettier. Or why I need to see a thread about 'being short' or 'being a high schooler.'
It's quite saddening that many people don't realize this, and that I even know this much about these threads. By virtue of this post, I feel as if I'm playing into the mind game of these posts, but I had to get it out there.
In the end, you live your own life. Don't let these pages dictate your life. Get your own boyfriend your own way (or don't get one at all), get your own picture/pose inspiration yourself, actively search for ways to inspire yourself creatively without these pages, figure out your own self for yourself.
