I distinctly remember being added to the “Hillsdale Class of 2022” Facebook page the summer after high school graduation. Hundreds of incoming freshmen were asked to introduce themselves, drop their social media handles, and get to know each other. Through this forum, I found myself following dozens of my future classmates on Instagram. I got to know them through direct messaging, feeling sure that even though they seemed way cooler than me online, we were all going to automatically be friends upon arrival at Hillsdale. I was wrong.
Looking back, I know that perspective was extremely naïve, but I’d been clinging to the hope that these people from coastal states and better means, who seemed so much larger-than-life, would be fast friends. What I found instead was a group of people who (I realized much later) were just that — people.
Freshman year at Hillsdale College was one of the hardest periods of my life, and Instagram was a direct enabler of that emotional turmoil. Though I’d initially realized that my classmates did not necessarily equal their social media personas, I continued to buy what they were selling. Daily, I scrolled past images of late-night McDonald’s trips, “candid” portraits, and group study sessions. I watched my fellow freshmen experience what appeared to be an incredible first semester while I sat in my dorm room, isolated and depressed. Instagram perpetuated the notion that everyone was having a better time than I was, and I felt that that meant I did not belong here.
In August of my sophomore year, I deleted my Instagram account as part of a social media overhaul. I had spent the better part of that summer unraveling the lies that had fed my freshman mindset and realizing that Instagram did not directly correlate to real life. I immediately found that I spent less time comparing myself to unrealistic aesthetics I saw online and dwelling unhealthily on the implications of these comparisons. I suddenly did not have access to the personal lives of others, unable to stalk their profiles for incriminating or informative images, and, conversely, people had to ask me directly for my own details. I freed myself from the obsession that often comes with Instagram and instead had far more time and open-mindedness to develop friendships with women about whom I had no preconceived ideas.
Instagram inhibits genuine interaction and relationship. It fuels emotional malnutrition in many of its users, including dozens of women on this campus. It promotes unhealthy comparisons and disingenuous perspectives. It is and always will be perpetually unfulfilling. Life doesn’t look like Instagram — and it’s not supposed to. For the sake of your mental well-being and authentic character, delete your Instagram.
Danae Burdett is a junior studying American Studies.
