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Joaquin Moreno

Jackie Burr, Instructor

English 2010, Section 3

11 February 2019

An Open Letter to Instagram

Despite your ability to entertain, I am not entertained. When you were first created in

2010, everybody wanted to know what you were all about. A brand new app, so simple, so

innocent, and so “cool”. Every single person, including me, fell in love with you. You were

everything a student in school could ever want. Middle school, the years in which you captivated

me, status was the best way to gain prestige and popularity, and that for students was everything.

Everybody was mesmerized, entranced, to this day I am in high school and many people are still

like this. The desire to have a popular social status thrives in school communities. You,

Instagram, you didn’t ignite this fire of status desire, however, you kept the fire burning and

allowed it to reach heights it hadn't reached prior to your creation. You looked so nice and

innocent, a harmless source of pictures and entertainment. However, even though I too fell for

your trap, as soon as I realized your ability to distort reality and create invisible negativity, I ran

as far away from you as possible.

I was consumed by you like everybody else was, I made sure that I looked a certain way

when I was with you, talked in a condescending manner, acted like a person that had a high

status. You changed the way people saw me, you changed the way that I socialized with others,

but most of all you changed the person I really wanted to be. When I was in the seventh grade I

would always make sure to post something on Instagram twice every week to show my audience
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(family, friends) how fun and great of a life I have. I made sure that I looked like I had the

“coolest” friends and that we always did the “coolest” things together. It was all lies. Looking

back now I would gladly take those words I used to describe myself and friends such as cool,

popular, a stud, etc.and replace them with fake, weak minded, and fool. I was showing a life on

Instagram that wasn’t mine, a complete facade. I was so fixated with showing off my perfect life

I was terrified of ever being left out of something my friends would do. A common problem with

most middle schoolers, fear of missing out. I became mentally weak and unstable because of it.

All because of you. Instagram you manipulated me, you fooled me and gave me fake friends who

(like me at the time) only wanted to be able to post something to raise their status. Such a strange

way of socializing.

I’ll give it to you, you’re an application that does indeed allow people to communicate

and see friends and make new friends, but the truth you choose to hide is that you only show the

masks and edited faces of those friends/ people. You choose deception over truth. The users

simply do what everybody else on the platform is doing, posting pictures about the jaw-dropping,

perfect parts of their lives. That is what all the other users see, perfect lives everywhere. Men and

women with perfect smiles, perfect bodies, and what seems to be perfectly happy lives.

Comparing one's life to another's fake life is what ruins peoples opinion of themselves,

their self-esteem (like mine) can drop. Anybody using you, Instagram, is unknowingly

comparing themselves to others and it's happening all the time. With only two hours a day on

any social media users may get higher levels of anxiety and negative mental thoughts. I was

glued to my screen when I was still active with you, I thought you gave me the world. You made
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me feel as though I could see and be anything I desire. Not only that but you gave me something

to look forward to every single day, a phone screen.

You used to entertain me Instagram, you had neverending entertainment. I could scroll

through what you had to offer all day long. I would always see pictures of my so-called “friends”

and I’d maybe message them, however, 90% of our interaction was through you Instagram. I

recall always telling my friends that we should get together and do something, they would agree,

but 2 months later we hadn’t even called each other. It wasn’t normal, on many days I would

prefer to stay inside at my house and have you by my side all the time instead of another human.

You were able to entertain me more than anybody else could with such ease. You were always in

hands reach, always accessible. There was just no need to go outside. I could scroll through you

for hours because that's what you were designed to do. You are a social media application that

does what it can to keep me entertained. You wanted me to sit at home for hours and consume

your entertainment, and this is exactly why I felt so alone in my middle school years. Despite all

my popularity and status, I felt isolated because of you. You made me feel alone, not special,

worthless.

I felt that what you and I had, our bond was something positive and good for me, possibly

a way for me to get out into the world. Instead, you did exactly the opposite and isolated me,

gave me negative thoughts about my self, ruined my self-esteem, gave me fake friends, made me

unstable. You fooled me completely and many others as well. At the end of the day what truly

matters and changes lives isn’t the dull lifeless interactions you allow us to have through a

phone, rather us going out of our way to meet somebody and conversate. Status and popularity

don’t matter as much as you think they do Instagram, people will find real friends who actually
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care about more important things than that. If I ever come across somebody who does care about

those things, I will stay away from them, as I did to you Instagram.

It was the best decision in my life in the tenth grade to forget about you and never access

you again. I learned to actually talk and care about people, I learned that you don't need pictures

through a phone to tell others what you have been doing, all you need is a voice. Nothing will

ever beat face to face interaction with another human, I wish you could realize that but you are

an app Instagram and you aren’t capable of such things. However, all that being said I want to

say thank you. Despite all the terribly hard times you have created in my life, you have taught me

many lessons and you've shown me how to truly live. I no longer promote a perfect life, I no

longer desire a high popular status of any kind, I no longer am glued to my phone, and most of

all I like the true person I am today and all the real friends I have as well. I, of course, learned

this by staying away from you but I never would have had something to learn and run away from

if it wasn’t for you Instagram.

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Works Cited

Newport, Cal. “Why You Should Quit Social Media.” TED. Jun. 2016. Lecture

Parnell, Bailey. “Is Social Media Hurting Your Mental Health?” TED. Jun. 2017. Lecture

“Does Technology Make Us Lonely?” ​Scholastic Choices​, vol. 33, no. 6, Mar. 2018, pp. 2–5.

EBSCOhost​,

search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=128052061&site=ehost-live.

“Instagram Linked to Young People’s Mental Health Problems.” ​Education Journal,​ no. 304,

May

2017, p. 12. ​EBSCOhost​,

search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=123230689&site=ehost-live.