Posting From the Apocalypse
The tender art of looking cool on Instagram
I was in high school when Instagram first took off. I’d spent my middle school years AIMing my friends on the gigantic desktop computer in the basement with dial-up internet, and then we all got Facebooks, where we posted pictures of ourselves from school dances and sleepovers and updated our relationship statuses every time a boy texted us. Instagram came at the exact right time in our collective adolescence, when we earnestly, sincerely wanted to be looked at, but not by our parents and grandparents, who all had Facebooks too so they could check up on us. Facebook was a website, Instagram was an app. This meant it was beyond their boomer brains. This meant freedom.
Those early days of Instagram were gushing with naive innocence, as everything was; highly-filtered selfies and modest attempts at artsy photography. It was how you knew what the popular kids were doing over the weekends because they’d post their blurry, intoxicated pictures on Monday morning after the alcohol poisoning had worn off. It was a place for posed prom photoshoots and long, essayistic captions about boyfriends and graduation and how much it all meant. When we all went to college, it was how we kept up with each other from states away. One friend’s profile was covered in pictures of her and her sorority sisters hanging onto each other in various states of undress. Another friend was obviously depressed based on her pictures of the sad dining hall food she ate while she studied on a Saturday night. Another friend was still living at home and taking a year off from school, so it was a lot of selfies with her dog (that one sounds familiar).
In a way, I grew up on Instagram. It was the place I went to humiliate myself and learn from it. I learned what outfits worked and what didn’t, if I was funny or sexy, if anyone cared about what I had to say at all. I don’t know how 20-somethings proved to each other that they were doing all the required 20-something things—drinking cheap wine and going out to crowded dive bars and then eating McDonald’s in bed—before the internet, but that’s what we used it for. I’ve since scrubbed my account of any evidence of my coming-of-age and now use it mostly to promote my writing, keep up with my friends, and check the hours of my favorite bars. I don’t pay attention to influencers and never have (I can find things to spend my hard-earned money on all by myself, thank you), and okay, fine, I sometimes find myself looking at the clock and realizing I’ve been scrolling through Reels mindlessly for an hour, but my relationship with the app is not as deep as it once was.
But I’ve noticed a trend in the past couple of years of people posting on Instagram like we used to. Well, kind of. They’re posting pictures of themselves, their friends, and their environments, seemingly intending to simply document their lives without any special performance for the internet. The “pictures or it didn’t happen” thing no longer applies, these are people doing things for the sake of the experience, not for “the gram,” and they’re documenting it for themselves more than for an audience. They all seem to be, roughly, of the Z generation. They’re all posting collections of pictures that make them look like characters from the show Skins, which is to say, they have a middle finger kind of essence: cigarettes and bloody knees and grungy, late-night, no-man’s land locations. They often have captions that read incongruous when paired with the photos, sometimes disembodied song lyrics or an ironic take on a popular phrase. They’re chaotic and blurry, like those of the popular kids back in high school, but these people weren’t popular in high school. They weren’t bullied weirdos either, but somewhere in between. For me, they would have been the kids who lived out on the islands surrounding Portland, Maine, and got ferried in every morning—the ones who always had the weed and threw parties on the docks every summer that I never got invited to.
The thing that’s missing in their posts is the earnestness. These kids abhor earnestness, they laugh at sincerity, and can you blame them? They’re told every day that social media is melting their brains, but not being on social media would mean total isolation. They’re told—and shown—every day that the world is ending, and then they’re expected to get up and go to class and study to become a lawyer. Even the cigarettes, I would imagine, take on a devil-may-care sort of role in the life of a person so often reminded of their own mortality. It’s still Instagram, so there’s still the implication that they want to be looked at, but they’re not gonna beg for it. They aren’t smiling in their selfies, but scowling, often not even looking at the camera. They’ve rejected earnestness in favor of irony.
Why does it make me feel so bad about myself?
I’m right on the cusp of Gen Z—I was born in 1995—but if you spent five minutes with me while I attempted to use any modern technology, you would understand why I identify firmly with the millennials, if not the boomers. Don’t even talk to me about the language Gen Z has apparently made up, I don’t want to know. I like to say that I’m old at heart. I wasn’t good at being a kid when I was one; I was more interested in television and talking than playing pretend or doing the monkey bars.
But I never grew out of feeling left out. I felt different from my peers when I was a kid, only ever feeling comfortable around people when they finally thought of me as an adult and someone they could take seriously. Kids like me because I remember being one of them and looking at the adults around me and thinking, “You think I’m so stupid. I’ll show you.” So, I talk to kids the same way I talk to adults. All kids want is respect, and teenagers even more so. When you’re a teenager your future feels distant and terrifying, so the every day is all you have, and it means everything. Teenagers hate nothing more than when adults treat them like the stuff they care about now won’t matter to them when they’re older. It’s important because it matters now. If that feeling festers, it results in a bunch of thoroughly bitter, disillusioned 20-somethings who post dark, confusing pictures of themselves and their friends on the internet.
The Gen Z kids on Instagram and their posting habits make me feel like I’m twelve again and I didn’t get invited to the sleepover. Once again, the cool kids all know something I don’t. At my worst, I just want to be like everyone else and to feel like I fit in. I know they’re just trying to fit in with the cool crowd too, though. Maybe they tell themselves there is no cool crowd, maybe they don’t think about it at all—it doesn’t change the fact that it’s a rite of passage to think you and your friends invented being cool, being young. They/we have been unlucky enough to find ourselves on the planet at a time of uncertainty, when they/we doubt if we’ll ever get to grow old, and question whether we should add more young people to the hoard. As a wise young boy once said in a Whole Foods, the sun could blow up tomorrow.
Let them think they’re cool. They definitely wouldn’t think this is cool, all this whining of mine. That’s okay. I was never cool like them, anyway.