The Mirror Wants an Audience

Prior to my years long absence from social media, I maintained a wellness Instagram (@hotyogagirly) accruing ten thousand followers over a span of five years. 2016 was a unique era, predating the oversaturation of instagram and rendering it easier to gain popularity as a microinfluencer. Overnight oats, green juice, and acai bowls were still novel obsessions. Jeannette Aranda of ‘shutthekaleup’ was at the height of her empire. She shunned artificial sweeteners and chemical-ridden low calorie alternatives in favor of nutrient dense, real food. These preferences were reflected in consumer trends, as then-coveted brands like Squarebar, Amazing Grass, and Vigilant Eats would disappear in the decade to come…and I would send dozens of tear-stained letters to CEOs begging for them back. The wellness community was still niche; it wasn’t at all common to encounter ‘what I eat in a day’ videos from influencers save for those specifically in the health sphere. Although my content was recipe centered, I featured my personal life regularly, sharing snapshots of my day through video clips of yoga flows or treadmill runs.

 The dissolution of my social media presence was owed to a culmination of personal reasons including perfectionistic tendencies. It became exhausting to lament whether a tofu bowl was ‘aesthetic’ enough to warrant a place on my feed, nor field unsolicited opinions on my body. I wanted to portray a specific essence – cozy, uplifting, and wholesome – which, ironically, began to be at complete odds with how I felt inside.

However, I never used social media as a means of self-promotion. I hid behind a brand, an ethos tied to lifestyle or eating habits. The notion of a repository of photos of just myself, for its own sake, gave me an ick of sorts — it always felt forced and narcissistic. This isn't a claim to moral high ground; ego is involved in how anyone presents themselves online, regardless of account type. But that same discomfort is why I can't use online dating. To so consciously and intentionally attempt to influence how someone perceives me – not just my acai bowl – felt deeply off. In some domains, perhaps this is to my detriment: I value privacy, maybe to a fault. As far as I was concerned, the only people I cared to share my life with were already getting texts, calls, the latest updates – why did strangers need to know? 

As a member of Gen Z, informing people you don’t keep any social media – save for snapchat – is a surefire way to get glanced at like a chicken with its head cut off. We have gotten so acclimated to adjusting our perceptions of others using social media as data, we are at a loss how to place someone who has foregone it. I conjecture that social media can function as a ‘social insurance.’ It’s a repository of photos one can reference to reinforce their desirability, compensating for any perceived deficits in real life. It relieves one of the burden to ‘prove’ their worth in person – often to romantic partners or potential friends. Thus, others’ real-life impressions of you are recontextualized through the visual argument you’ve made in favor of your looks, importance, social cache, and so forth. 

This summer, I downloaded TikTok at a friend's request, tired of my inability to watch the videos she sent me (spoiler: it lasted a week).The atmosphere had undeniably trended toward catering to diminishing attention spans, shamelessly looks-obsessed in a way my Instagram days had never been. I was unsure if it was a unique feature of the platform, or reflected an evolution in society more broadly. The user shares a video or image relaying an opinion, emotion, story. This appears to be the intention – to communicate an idea – and yet the idea could be conveyed without any image at all. The subject of the post is beside the point: a prop, a distraction, obscuring the post's real function as a bid for validation, a flaunting of the user's own attractiveness. Whatever the subject – a sunset, a meal, a grievance – it is only a vessel through which the user can be seen, differently costumed each time. Their looks seem incidental. They are, consciously or not, the entire point. 

Consequently, the importance of your perspective varies directly with how attractive you are. The more conventionally beautiful one is, the more authority they inherent, as if their approach to life is stamped with an aura of legitimacy. Suddenly, the masses are enamored with how this individual dresses, thinks, eats, and moves. When searching for a blueprint to life, we consult  ‘day in the life’ TikToks by a popular influencer as opposed to reading Aurelius’ Meditations. Physical beauty functions as a threshold – the immaterial, interior self is admitted for consideration only once the body has already qualified. Aesthetics once belonged to the world we looked out at: a landscape, a cut of fabric, anything encountered rather than embodied, endlessly revisable in pursuit of some greater beauty. Now the gaze has turned inward on its own bearer. It is no longer the world being refined but the one doing the looking –  man recast as a tweakable, nonsentient fixture of the environment, notwithstanding that he is largely fixed by genetics. 

The body is, of course, physical – it is only natural to admire its aesthetics, and to have preferences in attraction. But staging oneself across a hundred angles and filters — better lit here, more contoured there – is beside the point. You remain exactly who you are, however you've arranged yourself for an instant. To view one's own body, over and over, is redundant: we exist, helplessly, as we are – and will, until we die. No value is gained or lost by managing to look particularly pleasing in one frame; your most essential self – skin and bones as God made you – is visible only naked and bare-faced. However, there is a drive to assert our glamorized image to the world as proof of legitimacy, that one is worth befriending, dating, or envying. At its dark core, that one is worth existing. 

Humans are social creatures, evolutionarily driven to mind social status – a drive that reached its sharpest expression in premodern states and empires, where status could be directly converted into resources, protection, and mates. A feature of developed civilization, however, is our capacity to engage higher faculties – to ponder, to pursue the intellectual, rather than live a coarse, merely physical existence. Instead of expanding our inner world,  we’ve limited it to our screens, ingesting messages that reduce it to the corporeal. All the while, our minds degrade at the mercy of machines who have replaced our ability to write, read, and concentrate. In sum, we are far more concerned with how we look when lost in thought, rather than what we are thinking about. Our fixation on the sexual has completely corrupted our fascination with the nonphysical facets of existence. We celebrate physical beauty as a higher achievement than excellence in art, medicine, or strength of soul – these are acts, creations, things made, not merely had. There is an innocence to be grieved in physical beauty becoming such a centerpiece of the content we consume and create. Creativity no longer gives us satisfaction, but existing as an object of desire, does.

For a long while after I deleted my Instagram, I mourned the community I’d built. There were positives of building a community, romanticizing my life, and sharing memories now relegated to my camera roll. However, maintaining a wholesome corner of the internet is about as hard as containing an oil spill in the ocean. Eventually, sooner or later, I’d be exposed to content at odds with my fundamental ideals, perhaps even tempted to emulate it. I realized, in retrospect, what a gift it was to end my social media stint. Hovering over ‘delete’ on TikTok, I cut my umbilical cord to one imaginary world for a better one, and opened my book.