How to Look Awesome on Instagram
Instagram makes everyone miserable. Human beings were not meant to compare themselves to each other four times a day. But it is addictive misery and let’s face it, you are probably stuck on it.
So let the following be a helpful guide to how to master it.
1) Using your friend as a viral vector
As mentioned, Instagram makes everybody miserable, but it is specifically designed to be a cognitive dissonance torture device for young women.
You, the young female, click on it and up pops a photo of Margaret enjoying a sponsored trip to Mykonos. Scroll a little further and you can see your best friend from elementary school getting engaged. Go even further and there is your colleague celebrating a promotion.
You endure all of this torment while eating Cheetos and wondering why Mike didn’t Facetime you back.
Instagram as a rule makes you hate your friends but there is one time a year where it should make you love them – and that is on their birthdays.
Your girl friend’s birthday should make you happy for two reasons.
Reason 1) She just got a year older.
Reason 2) You can leverage her birthday to post an awesome thirst trap of yourself.
Birthday tributes are the social media equivalent of Halloween – the one time you can go full thirst trap without anyone calling you out on it.
The only rule is that your friend has to also be in whatever you post and you have to include some caption celebrating how fire she is.
So the perfectly angled bikini selfie you have with Cynthia is not about you – it is about Cynthia and how she is a boss b-tch. (You conveniently ignore the fact that you just met Cynthia three months ago and wonder aloud to your other friends whether she is an escort).
The truly best part about the birthday tribute is that Cynthia will re-post your homage because she thinks it is about her – Cynthia becomes the unwitting carrier host to your viral thirst trap.
2) Looking Cool While Traveling
The point of Instagram is to let the world know that you are not only hot but also that you are a person of means. Traveling in style photos are the best way to do that.
The strategy for women and men here is different.
a. Strategic use of the word “#blessed”
The vast majority of women who are aboard private jets and yachts are not paying for these experiences (this is true for many of the men as well), but for women it is often harder to pretend otherwise when the world knows that you are a dental hygienist.
So what do you do if you find yourself on a private jet or on a yacht. Well you get your friend and find a calm moment when no one is looking and you get a solo picture of yourself on said thing accompanied by the caption #blessed.
#Blessed is the ultimate weapon because it conveys faux humility and leaves open the possibility that the universe really did just randomly gift you a private jet trip to Miami.
The world doesn’t need to know that a promoter who has a dollar sign shaved on the side of his head invited you and your friends last minute to accompany some crypto nerd who just sold his NFT exchange.
#Blessed keeps that reality away from the world, and yourself.
b. Strategic use of idiotic guy friend
The guy who can actually afford the private jet can’t post pictures of himself on it. It is a bad look.
But he can bring along an idiotic friend who treats being on a private jet like a rookie scoring his first touchdown in the NFL. This friend will spike the football and do a little dance and make the whole world know that @MethodMan88 on Instagram has arrived i.e. just went on a private jet.
This victory dance will of course feature shots of the actually important guy on the jet as well.
Like the girl re-posting birthday pictures of herself with her thirst trapping friends, the idiotic friend serves as the viral vector letting the world know that there is another guy who can afford such things.
3) The I Care About Stuff Flex
When you have proven to the world that you are hot and rich, then the final mountain to climb is to prove that you are good.
This is the mountain that most celebrities are on.
Does Leo DiCaprio post thirst traps of himself on a yacht in Marbella with models? Never. He knows that you know that he is hot and rich and does cool stuff.
Leo instead posts about endangered frogs or native American tribes fighting mining companies. Leo is playing the final stage of the IG status game and that is the I care about stuff game.
(A guy this famous with this kind of IG feed is definitely on a boat in Marbella.)
The I Care About Stuff Flex can be achieved in different ways, but there is one important thing to note – and that is that you have to care about the right stuff.
If you post about how you care about gun rights or the rights of the unborn child, you might as well just shoot yourself in the face with a shotgun and take a selfie of that.
What is important is caring about things like Black Lives Matter or workers or women.
The way to do this is to post an article or an image and then follow it up with reams of paragraphs expressing your heart felt shock that “in this modern day, we still let x, y, z occur.”
You have to be careful not to go too overboard though in your virtue signaling.
If you express outrage over the fact that NBA players make significantly more than WNBA players, that might get you some equity/inclusion points but your smarter followers will wonder if you ever took an economics class.
So remember, be progressive but don’t do it to the point where people question your IQ.
The social media virtue signaling is particularly important if you are a wealthy white male with sociopathic tendencies.
If you post stuff like #BelieveHer and talk about how capitalism is evil, you can get away with assaulting women for years while running a capitalist firm (see here).
Folks will still defend you even though you are evil because you happen to be on their team. Human group psychology is weird – you might as well take advantage of it.
So there you have it. You are stuck in this awful misery maze of Instagram. It is worst than being addicted to cigarettes. The only silver lining to all this is that we are starting to understand how bad social media is to our psyches and perhaps over time, it will all be banned.
But until then, might as well navigate the awfulness effectively.