Mirror, Mirror on the Wall
"Pics, or it didn't happen" and the imaginary audience, forever (2 of 3)
In the first part of this series, I wrote about my mostly analog life growing up. I compared it with the Gen Z experience, with help from Freya India. And I stated that, though one would think an analog life would make me immune to the ills of social media, growing up simply with Facebook shaped me in such a way that I totally bought in to what social media was selling me later on.
I think it’s important to note before this second essay that, for me, leaving social media is not just about time management. While I certainly wasted plenty of time on social media, I have taken drastic measures over the years to decrease that waste. As it turned out, wasting time is not my biggest problem and it’s not the reason I ultimately deleted my Instagram. Here’s a brief overview of the time management measures, before we get to the good stuff:
When I was in college, I slept with my phone next to my head. It was my alarm clock. This also led to my developed habit of checking Instagram while falling asleep, and checking it while waking up. I scrolled in line, I scrolled on the subway, I scrolled while waiting for friends at bars. I came to hate this habit. I also documented, documented, documented (thank you Insta stories).
Over the years, I have taken more and more drastic measure to put boundaries on my phone. In 2019, I turned off notifications. I traveled to England and didn’t use social media while there. In 2021, I started sleeping with my phone across the room. Last year I started putting my phone in another room while I sleep. I also purchased and installed app blocking software called Freedom.
These drastic measures were simply bandaids that did not get at the the root of the problem: the way that social media shaped my deeper beliefs and behaviors. It’s two primary beliefs, and the behaviors that grew out of them, that I share about below.
My parents had a strong parenting style and strong opinions. My mom was always worried about us sitting too close to the TV or staring at a screen for too long. Apparently I was also strong, stubborn, and persuasive. When I was 13, I convinced my parents to let me open a Facebook account. How I accomplished this I am not entirely sure, but my parents finally agreed as long as I consented to monitoring. They would have my password and could check on my activity and read private messages anytime.
This came after having my own email account. The email account at the age of 12 was detrimental because, even though I didn’t have AIM, I used it to chat with friends online. The ability to privately message my peers online gave me far too much power. Unlike writing notes and letters, and calling on the phone, private messaging via email gave me the opportunity to say gossipy, mean things I never would have said in person. In a way, it opened up the door to online comparison and gauging my self-worth based on how people responded to me virtually, behaviors I continued on Facebook.
Then, I started my Facebook profile. It was the era of poking, top 8 eight friends lists, and statuses that were permanently in the “[NAME] is______” format. My favorite status that popped up in my memories was, “Heather Noelle Cate is around.” I must have been sending out a distress signal, hoping desperately that someone (especially my crush!) would ask me to hang out. Yes, subtext existed even then, in the form of moody Coldplay lyrics and away messages.
I’m sure a lot of us thought Facebook was harmless. But now I know that it contributed to my pre-existing insecurities and fears. Whatever healthy attachment I developed to my friends, Facebook undermined because it created a virtual space where I could judge my standing with my peers. Was I cool? Pretty? Desirable? Interesting? Funny? The number of red notifications waiting for me when I opened Facebook would provide the answers.
It also built into me the sentiment that, I would argue, defines my generation, the millennials:
Pics, or it didn’t happen.
Essentially, we needed shared photographic evidence to let our social group know that we did something cool, have cool friends, cool clothes, cool taste. We need to prove our social status with our posted Facebook statuses and photo albums.
This sentiment, and the innate need to prove our worth, led me and my peers to document everything and post the photos later on Facebook. Interestingly, the number of unflattering photos I was tagged in at least equal, if not outweigh, the number of cool photos of me. To this day, embarrassing photos of my teen years can be found in the depths of my account, if you’re willing to wait long enough for them to load.
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For years afterward, on Facebook and then on Instagram, I felt the strong urge to take photos (hundreds, thousands of photos) and post them on social media. We can think of this need to share photos as a seemingly innocuous one: I just want my family and friends to know what’s going on in my life!
But underneath that statement is something more noxious: the growing belief and anxiety that if I don’t share what’s going on in my life and people don’t like and comment on it, then my life isn’t valuable enough. I’m not valuable enough.
The Imaginary Audience — forever
The belief, Pics, Or It Didn’t Happen, came to be the foundation of what happened later, in my mid 20’s. At least, that’s how I trace the narrative and make sense of the shift away from just sharing non-political or opinionated photos to sharing all of our opinions and life-decisions online.
The sentiment that I saw emerging was: Social media is where you share about all of your life decisions and opinions.
Sometime in the late 2010’s, we were moving away from cute and random pictures with five word captions and into the era of paragraph captions. We had to explain everything: who we were voting for, why we were leaving jobs or taking new ones, what Christmas and Easter means to us, and why we love a certain friend, sharing a photo and a long caption on their birthday every year. I felt this pressure to the degree that it was almost something I owed people on social media. I couldn’t just disappear from it for a while, or celebrate a holiday without telling people why.
When I brought this idea up to my husband, he told me about the psychological concept of “the imaginary audience.”1
According to the APA Dictionary of Psychology, the imaginary audience is:
the belief of an adolescent that others are constantly focusing attention on them, scrutinizing behaviors, appearance, and the like. The adolescent feels as though they are continually the central topic of interest to a group of spectators (i.e., an audience) when in fact this is not the case (i.e., an imaginary audience). It is an early adolescent construct reflective of acute self-consciousness and is considered an expression of adolescent egocentrism.
As kids, we think everyone is watching us. That explains why, when my dad did something I perceived to be silly, I felt extreme embarrassment because I thought everyone was watching. My dad tried to tell me this was not the case. When I was worried about what other people thought, he told me, people are too busy thinking about themselves. They weren’t watching or thinking about me.
I was a kid with a lot of insecurity. I really worried about what people thought of me. I had a strong imaginary audience. As I’ve pondered how social media affected me personally, I realized this: having a Facebook in my teens exaggerated and solidified my sense of the imaginary audience. I felt I was “continually the central topic of interest to a group of spectators” on Facebook and, later, on Instagram.
The belief in an imaginary audience is something that we are supposed to grow out of. It’s a developmental stage. Well-adjusted people come to have a more realistic understanding of the place in the world and how others perceive them. The imaginary audience might pop up every once in a while — think of the time you trip on an empty sidewalk and feel embarrassed until you realize no one is watching — but it shouldn’t be something that follows us around all day, every day.
So what happens when you live your life overly aware of an imaginary audience and convinced that you must share photos with that audience, or “it didn’t happen”?
What happens is that you feel the need to share on social media about your whole life, little things and big things.
Here’s a handful of what I felt compelled to share on social media, around and after circa 2019: books I was reading, career moves and decisions, meals I cooked, the amount of weight I was power-lifting at CrossFit, counting macros, my experience of singleness, podcasts I liked and political opinions I agreed with, and why I was taking breaks from social media.
I also wrote and shared about incredibly serious and personal experiences in 2020: my father’s death and my experience of grief.
On the one hand, I was venturing into the world of blogging and online writing, and was receiving encouragement and feedback to keep doing so. This, I think, was a positive outcome. Here I am, still writing and blogging four years later.
On the other hand, I was being ruled subconsciously by an imaginary audience and my deep desire to be seen as worthy and valuable. This desire magnified when I left my New York community and tried to restart my life twice, first in Maryland and then in Virginia.
We all desire to be seen. I believe it’s a desire innate in each of us, placed there by a Creator who longs for us to feel His loving gaze, to be assured that we are more deeply known and cherished by Him than we could ever be loved and known by another human. God is not an imaginary audience. He is the most real observer of our outer and inner lives.
Yet I can’t see Him. And I look to the people around me more often than I look to Him. I want to be seen, known, validated, and loved by the human beings around me. I think most people want that, and we often go to extreme levels to obtain those things.
When we are handed a tool in which we could be known, seen, validated, loved, revered, even worshipped by human beings beyond our daily physical spheres of influence? Of course we will use it to that end, whether we are conscious of our deeper motives or not. “I just want my family and friends to see my life” becomes “I want my broad imaginary audience to see and know that I am awesome.”
Of course I want to broadcast my life to and beyond my local community, into the stratosphere of the interwebs. I want my friends and acquaintances all over the world to know that I have an awesome life, job, family, marriage, friends, adventures, wardrobe, ideas, thoughts, and opinions.
Maybe if we get enough likes on our posts about these things, we will finally know that we matter. Better yet? What if we could make money off these awesome lives, jobs, families, marriages, friends, adventures, wardrobes, ideas, thoughts, and opinions? Then we can take that money and pour it back into things we can post about, and the cycle continues. Our awesomeness will magnify, our insecurities will vanish, and we will live our best lives.
But we all know deep down it hasn’t worked this way. The algorithm changes. Paid advertisements take over. People stop caring about your grief, your problems, your opinions. Their lives move on, and you wonder if your audience still sees you and cares about you.
After a year of posting about my grief and life after loss, it became too much for me. Amidst a modest amount of praise and appreciation for my writing, I knew I needed to stop. I felt the desire to protect my grief, and to simply experience it without having to write about it.
I stopped blogging and I did not use Instagram for the entire year of 2021. I didn’t log on, scroll, like, share, or post. I moved to a new town without it. I made friends and they got to know me through my physical presence before they were given an online impression of me.
This was the beginning of the end of my relationship with the platform. But it would take another two and a half years for me to say goodbye once and for all. What happened in those two years? My boyfriend (now husband) deleted his Instagram, I took many breaks and digital detoxes, and I read Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport.
I also got married. And I was so tempted to post as many beautiful photos of myself in my wedding dress as I could justify. But the rift between me and social media had begun. And every time I thought about posting, I had to be honest with myself about why.
Mirror, Mirror on the wall
Why do I want to post that close-up portrait? Why do I want to share all my wedding photos in which I look really good and happy? Why do I want to spend two hours creating an Instagram reel of this most spectacular day, set to a heartfelt song?
My motives were not pure, and I knew it. Yes, I wanted to celebrate and remember and invite others into the joy of my wedding day, of finally finding the love of my life and marrying him!
But I also wanted a truly imaginary audience — all the people who spurned me and doubted me and wondered if I would ever get married — to see: I’m the happiest and fairest of them all. Instagram and Facebook could be the mirror in which I looked to get my regular dose of validation.
iPhone, iPhone in my hand, who is the best, most beautiful, most wonderful, most happy, most smart, most interesting in the land?
But who is really in that mirror, looking back at me? It’s not an audience. It’s not friends and acquaintances who really love me and want the best for me. It’s a projection of my own inflated ego, wracked with uncertainty and insecurity. Who will see me? Who will love me? The mirror only reflects what I desperately want to believe about myself.
Over the past 6 months, since I got married, I had my final reckoning with Instagram. After suppressing my convictions for a year — social media increases anxiety in teens, social media reduces us to commodities, social media increases chances of young children seeing pornography, etc. — I could ignore them no longer.
I had to admit that my usage of Instagram was akin to the Evil Queen in Snow White with her Mirror on the Wall. And that rather than reflecting true beauty and goodness, it was making me ugly inside.
When I scrolled through Instagram, I became cynical and disdainful of what other people were posting. I rolled my eyes. I thought the stuff other people posted was lame, and I felt embarrassment at myself for the only thing I wanted to post: photos of me in my wedding dress.2
I knew it wouldn’t stop there, at my wedding. As the years go on, I know I would want to post the highlight reel of my life: pregnancy, children, how amazing and cute they are, career growth, wealth accumulation, travel experiences — if I ever have any of that.3 Because, at the end of the day, I still believe: pics for my imaginary audience, or it didn’t happen.
I finally realized that it would not matter how many barriers and boundaries I put up around Instagram; I would always hold that deep-seated belief that I need to prove myself on social media, unless I deleted it once and for all.
What happened next was surprising: after deleting, I discovered, for the first time in 17 years, the joy of not being seen.
This is Part 2 of a three part series about my online life, and what led me to permanently delete my Instagram. If you aren’t yet subscribed, you can do so below to get part 3 directly to your inbox! Thank you for reading Now We See Dimly.
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We are not the first ones to connect the idea of the imaginary audience to social media.
I also learned about the tradwife trend on Instagram and was very concerned. As someone who makes sourdough and wants to homestead, I was afraid to accidentally fall into the tradwife trend, and I felt the strong need to get rid of the app.
I read opinion pieces about why parents should be careful about the photos they post of their kids online. I felt the need to delete social media before I have kids and want to post photos of them everyday.
I just want to say I'm here and vastly enjoying this series as a Gen Z-er who practically "grew up analog." I'm on the older end of Gen Z and my parents were slow to get new technology, but I can relate to how having a device doesn't necessarily change a relationship with technology for the better. I've never had a traditional, large social media like any of the Meta-run platforms, but having even small sites has hurt me in a lot of ways. I am happy to say that my relationship is improving, slowly but steadily. (Cut down to under 2 hours on my phone a day, not replacing it with computer time, either!) I just wanted to write a note to encourage you and thank you from the bottom of my heart for sharing your journey thus far.