THE PHENOMENON OF FILTERED SQUARES

Psychological damage on a daily Instagram scroll is quietly visiting us with depression, resentment, low self-esteem and loneliness.  Yet millions use it to project their seemingly successful lives through percolated lens and cropped pictures projecting envy inspiring lives.

What makes us green with envy  through these filtered pictures of a couple toasting champagne on a business class cabin  jetting off on a far-away holiday serves to remind us of the toll and grind of everyday commuting life on a budget.  It should stop you to think the need to display wealth, culture, good taste and a care-free life, when if fact their troubles are hidden behind; you just choose not to see it but to envy.

Another is "food-ism"   Along with eating at Michelin star restaurants, or invited to Ambassadorial dinners, the picture perfect mounds of Beluga Caviar,  elegant Scottish salmon;  or some foreign delicacies,  each showing off our perfect taste and our unlimited pocket.

Yet another is “oh woe is me”  -  those pictures taken from hospital beds, saline drips connected or hospital wrist band  indicating expensive private hospitals.   It says,  please send me well wishes.  A retinue of “speedy recovery” messages inundate the pings that count into the thousands.

One more pet-peeve is the “ultra-sound” polaroid of a baby in the womb.  Anyone who knows me, knows I am not a screwed-up, old fashioned, lack-lustre, bitchy barren woman.  It is indeed a wondrous celebratory occasion best kept to those who really care and not the Instagram world at large to feast upon.

This process of "I want to be rich like him" or "I want to be thin like her"  this mindless showing off through these square filters, are breeding a culture of people fascinated with stalking  and permanently aware of being stalked; of people fascinated by half realities that the real world is just too boring.

Fancy dinners

Business class travel

Michelin Star dessert

I'm guilty of these very sins.  A scroll through my own Instagram you can see all of the above.  Despite shooting myself in the face,  I shall address this with my own vulnerability of how I wish to be perceived.   My filtered square showed an opened Apple Mac to a  saucy chapter of my novel I had just written.... the background displayed a sunny day by a pool at an exclusive club.    

The message?  

1) Apple Mac says it all. 
2) My life in a tropical country,  (not godforsaken Chicago in mid-winter )
3) Boasting my literary skills as a burgeoning author; (education prowess)
4) Writing under the enviable privileged club that many could hope to visit but difficult to belong.  
 
I was recently invited to join in a wedding ceremony and lunch on an exotic beach.  The invite  had an RVSP and  a reminder of how wonderful the day would look on Instagram. 

Everything looked right, the bride & groom, the families, the friends, the wonderful occasion set in one of the most romantic places in the world.  So what was wrong?   The crassness of the Instagram reminder.  

So what should we do to improve the psychological harm this affects people?  Maybe you might think what is so wrong to flaunt your laurels to the world?   None of these people are really your friends, that wish you well.  Some are even strangers wishing to be followed so in turn follow you first - hoping your generosity will adversely add their numbers.  

Not much can change an addictive one billion users with numbers  rising monthly.   Only awareness and self correcting -  could perhaps help ease the depression, low self esteem, resentment and learn to live in the NOW.