Instagram Induced Psychosis and Female Identity

Is your identity just a trend?

I wonder how many people share the experience of wanting to have every single career in the world. You watch a ballet performance and want to be a ballerina, you see someone playing the harp and think it would be a wonderful instrument to learn, a video of a woman making bagels from scratch inspires you to learn how to be a world class baker, and a video of a model in Rome makes you wonder what you’d need to do to get that kind of figure and wear that kind of outfit. All of these different characters cycle through your head and you want to be everyone and consequently feel that you are no one.

Enjoy this essay on identity in the social media age, coming of age for young women, what it is that we can meaningfully change about ourselves and what qualities will always be ours no matter what we do.

Imitation is considered by many to be a form of flattery, but it is also considered one of the best ways for human beings to learn anything new. By watching how others do things that we aspire to do, we imagine ourselves in their place, and through this imagining--a powerful form of visualisation--we map out our actions and execute an imitation.

Although the imitation begins as something mediocre and out of step, with practice, the imitator figures out the internal skills required to produce the final performance perfectly. Through this imitation exercise, the imitator may then use the internal skills he or she has acquired to pursue their own original endeavours.

An example of this is how an artist might learn to draw first by copying drawings from master artists like Charles Bargue and in the process learn important skills like measuring proportion and value, as well as the mechanical skill involved in drawing. The result of the successful imitation is not the well imitated product but the skills acquired in the process. And the student, having completed a good imitation, then has the ability to do his own drawings with greater competence.

This imitation exercise also applies to young people when they are developing their own sense of identity, especially when they are under the age of thirty. The cultivation of one’s personal identity is most active in the second and third decades of life because this is the psychological phase in which a person has not yet committed themselves strongly to any one vocation or relationship as strongly as people who are older ought to have done. That is to say, they are usually not married yet, have not yet had children, have not started their businesses or completed their training for the vocation of their choosing. Once these choices and decisions are made, they form us in irreversible ways and thus lock us into more hardened moulds that permit us to do the real work of life without the squishiness and caprice of youth.

Although the growing pains of identity development are nothing new and have been cornerstones for human development throughout time, social media has added new dimensions to this problem because of the ways in which it has restructured the ways in which we view others and the ways in which we view ourselves.

First, it has changed everyone from people to “accounts”. And these accounts organize into categories that an algorithm can recognise, sort and deliver to users most likely to engage with them, and therefore generate ad revenue for the social media company. If you are a girl who likes to post videos of herself cooking, childcare tips, and dress ideas, perhaps you will be categorised as “trad wife content” and your account will appear to people interested in that category. The more your social life is funnelled through social media, the more you will entrench yourself into your prescribed category in order to assuage “the algorithm” to keep bringing you a sense of accomplishment through likes and shares. “Account growth” is used subconsciously by many a metric for social success even as it says nothing about the depth and quality of the relationships one fosters through these social metrics (much less how much money these social metrics generate).

As people become their accounts, their identities are dissected and displayed like taxidermic body parts for public consumption. Sometimes we see something wonderful on display. Perhaps one woman has very beautiful hair, another has an excellent figure, another has a beautiful home. I limit these examples to women because these issues are psychologically most present among women and I have yet to meet any straight man who obsesses over social media on a personal level. Furthermore, because of the nature of the medium, we confuse a well-shot video with a high level skill. A woman who isn’t so good at filming herself cooking or drawing might be much more skilled at it than someone who knows how to get the lighting and angles right to display her hobby. In addition, social media makes us think that the central aspect of a hobby is filming it, when in reality, all this does is hinder us from the intimate work involved in doing a thing!

The result is that we collapse all of social media into one woman and create an idealised image to measure ourselves against. The flaw in this way of thinking about others as one conglomerate, is that we set up an impossible, and highly doctored standard to achieve. There are some people who have one area of life figured out, one skill mastered, but not necessarily others. People rarely showcase their flaws and this is good manners, actually. It is undignified to air your dirty laundry in public. But we also shouldn’t spend all our free time at the houses of strangers we can never truly be intimate and real with.

The only way to get to know real people is to know them personally, and in real life. This gives them the correct social privacy and intimacy to share their struggles with you so that you see their whole personality rather than just the one or two traits they show to the world. Some people share 100% of their lives (including their struggles and flaws) with the public but this doesn’t necessarily promote connection or help us all form better identities ourselves. When women share their negative traits and aspects for the gawking public, it is an act of vulgarity because it is selling your privacy and dignity under the farcical guise of “authenticity”.

These negative traits—stretch marks, a messy home, conflicts in a marriage, pimples—once shared publicly, are ridiculed and therefore even more abhorrent when we notice them in ourselves. When negative traits are shared in a real relationship rather than a public para-social one, the intimate details of life are earned and are therefore not a perverse exhibition that invite scorn and ridicule. So if your real life friend who is so beautiful and intelligent shares with you her struggle with her parents or her love-life, in a personal intimate setting, you are more willing to give her love, grace and kindness for these problems. As such, when you have similar ones, you are less likely to feel ashamed about them.

The way that people present online is hardly ever human and it is by design. It is important to form real bonds with people away from their online persona in order to have a real human relationship with people. In this way, even if you do compare yourself to others, it will be to human beings and not to constructed personas.

There is also a degree of kindness and satisfaction you must derive from just being yourself. There are many aspects of your personality that you can change but there are some core aspects to your temperament that cannot ever be changed. Even if you were raised with the same resources and upbringing as someone else, you would never be exactly like them because you are two distinct, unique, souls. It is possible to admire the qualities of another person, and accept that you are not like them and find loveliness in your own personality.

How can we distinguish personality traits that are changeable from ones that are intrinsic and “stuck”? The changeable traits have to do with virtues and vices whereas the intrinsic ones have to do with mood and humour.

A person who is naturally boisterous and funny cannot change herself, however hard she tries, to be quiet and melancholic. A person who is naturally demure and reserved cannot change herself, however hard she tries, to be loud and boisterous. A sensitive soul cannot become glib and a glib one cannot overnight become sanguine. These are temperaments and humours.

But you can change yourself to become more patient, more kind, more charitable, more modest, more courageous or more honest. This is because these are all virtues that can be practiced and improved upon at any time. These are also not trends nor can they be easily advertised on social media or captured in a photograph to prove them to the world. As a result, we often see someone else’s interests, humours, hobbies and physical accomplishments but rarely do we see their virtues.

Above all, we must learn temperance of our own humours, personalities so that we may be more balanced overall and be able to make decisions from the will rather than merely the passions. The passions are important fire that propels the impulse to life and to choose the endeavours that are right for us, but the will and intellect help us to direct passion and keep it disciplined because fire power can do nothing useful when it is scattered.

There is no one who can do things the way you can do them. Although many people may have a similar idea, the way that you execute your idea will be entirely unique to you. Identity is built most powerfully through action and when you choose to act in one direction you are also consciously deciding not to act in another. It is common for young people to feel anxious that they are missing something or making the wrong decision when they settle on one course of action to the exclusion of others, but this anxiety is a natural consequence of the beginning of the formation of an identity.

Girls tend to like school because it tells them exactly what they need to be doing and when. The real world is quite different and this can be both daunting and exciting. The opportunity is not to be taken for granted and ought to be used to the best of one’s ability to build something of value, with real skills. This is where the best identities come from.