225 editor Jennifer Tormo. Photo by Collin Richie.
Like many millenials, I’m sure, I have mixed feelings about social media.
I spend a lot of time on it—too much time. To be fair, I mostly think of it as research for work. Our 225 team finds so many story ideas on Instagram and Facebook, not to mention endless creative inspiration.
But I also think it’s pretty cool that I can open an app, type in a location and see what’s happening there in real time through photos and video. For fun, I just now picked up my phone and typed in “Honolulu, Hawaii” on Instagram’s location search, and I watched a seaside sunset in the mountains. Social media is magical!
Social media definitely has it merits—we can virtually glimpse corners of the globe we might never visit. We’re constantly exposed to new cultures and ideas that we might never have encountered otherwise. And it is an incredible tool for building community and making friends.
It has downsides, though. In an age where oversharing is the norm, I wrestle with what constitutes too much sharing and what’s not enough.
One night a couple years ago, I took a deep dive on my own Instagram page. I scrolled way back, nearly 1,000 posts ago, to my beginnings on the app in 2012. Suddenly, I was back in Instagram’s early days, full of square-cropped, heavily filtered snapshots. Back when the app still felt shiny, new and fun—and before it morphed into the powerful business tool it is today.
The longer I scrolled, the more I realized that my favorite photos weren’t of perfectly saturated snoballs or the totally ’grammable park I visited on a summer road trip.
The photos I reconnected with were the ones with people—with my best friends out at the bar, with my coworkers at a cool work event, or with my fiance, smiling at the camera when we first started dating.
They were the kind of photos that later became uncool, before we were modeling like influencers in our vacation pics. But they brought back experiences that I might have forgotten.
Something clicked for me that night. I realized I was living too much for the ’gram. While traveling, I’d be so focused on editing my scenery photos that I’d ignore the actual scenery around me. At concerts, I’d watch the performers through the tiny screen on my phone as I recorded videos. At lunch, I’d let my food get cold while I tried to capture it from every angle.
So I decided to take a break from Instagram and reset my priorities.
I love taking pictures of everything—landscapes, houses, my food, hotel decor—and I don’t think that will ever change.
But I decided to take a step back—just take one picture instead of 20. I wanted to re-train myself to capture those in-between moments too—the smiling faces on my friends after we’d finished a great meal instead of just the food itself.
Take a photo, put the phone away and be done with it.
Before I knew it, my one-month sabbatical was stretching to two, and eventually over a year.
A blogger I love to follow recently took a month off from social media, and afterward she shared all the internal battles she struggled with during those weeks. Will I stay relevant? she wondered. Will people remember me?
This is what I’ve wondered since I stopped posting. As a creative, can you be respected if you’re not constantly sharing your own work? Will my friends back home still think about me, even if I’m not reminding them of my existence every day on Instagram?
I have a lot of respect for influencers—it’s the coolest thing that they found a way to reach their dreams by sharing their lives online. I can’t get enough of all the designers, editors, beauty gurus, fashion bloggers and photographers I follow.
I also love the slow shift that social media is making back toward authenticity through unfiltered photos and videos, and raw and real captions.
But personally, I still have a long way to go toward finding a healthy way to consume—and utilize—social media.
Once I get there, I hope that I can share my voice in as meaningful of a way as all the influencers I love to follow do. And when I scroll back in five years, I hope I’m proud of what I see.
