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I've regained a lot of mental peace once I quit Instagram. When you have hundreds of friends and follow other random people on the platform, you get the impression that every single person is always on a beach in Bali, eating at Michelin star restaurants, riding lambos and partying with attractive successful people in the most exclusive venues out there. All the while you're a corporate drone sitting in a cubicle all day, or you're stuck in traffic, or are dealing with a shitty boss, or you're trying to figure out how to pay rent.

In reality, those people don't have that lifestyle. They're simply marketers and FOMO generators, but our brains aren't super good at seeing past that.

It's analogous to how regular people don't realize just how much Photoshop and photographic skill goes into making someone look as good as they do in magazines and on their IG feed. We look at them and immediately conclude that we're some kind of a sub-human degenerate species compared to them, whereas in reality it's all bullshit.

It feels SO much better to swim in one's lane, not looking around to see how everybody else is doing, especially when it's not real.

I'm not a religious person, but there's something really powerful in the admonition not to not covet your neighbor's spouse, house, animals (car?) etc. Except it's much worse with IG, where you're exposed daily to hundreds if not thousands of "neighbors" who are all showing off their pretend-success.

The genius of IG is that it makes people willingly subscribe to hours of marketing every day.



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