There’s a foolproof way as a woman to ensure that you get rest when it is required for physical healing. There’s a pesky little app called Instagram. You may have heard of it. Known for encouraging suicidal ideation in 12-year-old girls, it is also downright demonically calibrated to cause you to park your rear on the nearest piece of furniture suitable for lounging in order to passively absorb the visual noise of millions of strangers while the makers of the unhappiness machine try to sell you things.
As stated above, this makes it an excellent tool for physical rest. While your body sits still and heals itself, your mind becomes frayed, scattered, and susceptible to rot.
Part of what makes Instagram so pernicious is the algorithm that aims to identify what interests you. As you stare into the glow of all those little squares, navigating like an ape with jabs and swipes of a digit, the machine is learning about you. A stray tap here or there and the images generated for you to consider change. Any perceived interest in a genre, hashtag, or type of account, and the endless train of images becomes flooded with that topic.
Which is how, after looking up a blogger you used to follow who is in the “mommy blogger” sphere, you will suddenly find the suggested content inundated with babies and mothers. Shaped by the app itself as their content is, the mothers are interchangeable—same dresses, same adult diaper photo, same vulnerable captions. The children, unique and irreplaceable in reality, are rendered on the app unidentifiable from each other with the same names, the same bows, the same crocheted receiving blankets. To fall into this depersonalized world, a part of the internet obsessed with new motherhood, is bewildering.
As I’ve written about elsewhere, the perceived vulnerability of sharing pictures of yourself in an adult diaper is, in plain fact, a disturbing violation of your own privacy. In this unnerving part of Instagram, you may end up watching an anxious and unhappy mother fret for an entire night about how to get her five-month-old child to sleep—while taking the time to film snippets of every hour of the night, create a montage, and then interact with the comments of strangers on said montage. It is strange and undeniably sad. Where are other mothers with babies to befriend this lonely woman? Surely, most of the reason she’s anxious is staying up all night documenting her lack of sleep. Who can sleep with a camera in her face?
From this loud and nosy world of intimate moments and behind-the-scenes peeks, it’s hard to remember how unnecessary it all is. Can someone who’s mind has been addled by the app imagine a life in which no one, save the six people you saw in person, needs to know what you wore home from the hospital. No one needs to see the hazy predawn moments. The raw, real-time updates about life following birth shatter what can be a meditative calm. The meaning of all this is not yet knowable and certainly need not be shared.
Our culture has tried to convince mother’s that they are “in the trenches,” that motherhood is a life of challenges and feats. There is some of that, but to focus on a mother’s perceived hardships is to miss the whole point.
Years ago, on an outing with one baby with a group of mothers who also each had one baby, virtual strangers united only in having a child to care for all day in a sea of busy professionals, one of the mothers noted how like vacation it all was. Sure, you had to care for the baby, but you got to do all kinds of fun and relaxing things along the way.
Everyone looked a bit irritated at that comment. Wasn’t this all an endless slog of sacrifice and suffering? Wasn’t it straight from adult diapers to three years of mandatory sweatpants because your body was unrecognizable and you had no time to care for yourself? Instagram can make you believe all kinds of strange things, but an ounce of perspective is a glorious boon to health and happiness.
Having a baby does not always result in one unending night of suffering and fretting about what you will wear and what the baby will wear and whether you are grocery shopping correctly. Peer groups are great, but mentors are much greater still.
Instagram is a trap that offers the illusion of connection but with precious few of the benefits of companionship with other human beings. Instead of benefitting from soul-nourishing wisdom and friendship, Instagram can dupe you into spending your time and money to look exactly like everyone else.
Without Instagram, many young mothers may find it is simply blissful (which is not to say easy, uncomplicated, or straightforward) to have babies and keep a home for your family (which is not to say you don’t do anything else with your days on Earth).
This recent, physically helpful but mentally disturbing foray into the world of what is called “social media” has renewed my fervor. Five years ago, I wrote,
Social media can be harmless, even useful. However, when taken to its logical end it can be a poison pill that makes our private lives public and our story limited and human, not divinely written. If scrolling through Facebook or coming up with pithy captions for Instagram makes you bored and listless, join the pretentious and ditch your account. If the glowing screen perpetually hovering between mother and child to capture moments of fleeting beauty disturbs you, put your own phone away. Don’t be like Prufrock waiting for the inevitable end; chart a happier course.
On the other hand, if you want to keep doing something silly that makes you miserable, in the profound words of social media doyen Rachel Hollis, “That’s on you.”
What more is there to say? Well, sure, there’s lots that could be said, such as this reflection by Tsh Oxenreider on her reasons for logging off permanently. I think for now, I’ll leave it there.
