Instagram has much to answer for. A million city flats stuffed to the gunwhales with jungly house plants till you can’t get in the bathroom; all those never-to-be-reclaimed hours lost to cute kittens playing with babies; and that feeling of inadequacy you get as you look at yet another trug artfully filled with home-grown vegetables more colourful, immaculate and plentiful than you have ever managed in 30 years of growing your own food.
After a little too long staring at my screen than is good for me, out I go into my own garden, nettle-studded, shaggy, scaffold board raised beds disintegrating here and there as they rot quietly into the earth, and all I can see is the broken fences and lumpy paving.
I forget that those rotting raised beds are full of the food that will feed me, low-carbon and pesticide-free, through this year and next. I no longer see that the nettles have raised this summer’s butterflies, after a spring of providing me with free home-made fertiliser; I don’t notice that the soil is rich and full of wriggly worms just as it should be.
Nope: all I can see are the faults. It’s no wonder the platform came out worst for teenage mental health in research (carried out, incidentally, by its parent company Meta – the company formerly known as Facebook). In the UK 13% of users who reported suicidal thoughts said they started on Instagram.
And I think the underlying reason is simple. The platform has created its identity, its very reason for existing, on absolute perfectionism. You strive and strive to make your trug of vegetables Instagrammable (there is a chilling word if ever you heard one) and there is always, always someone with produce more perfect, with a trug more full of fatter, bigger, lusher vegetables. You can never win.
The curse of perfectionism isn’t confined to Instagram, though. It has been around for decades, maybe centuries: and wherever you find it, it is doing harm.
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