Is it normal not to have instagram?

"Look at me! Look at me! Look how cool my life is!"

This.

And the cool life portrayed is always merely surface appearances, always carefully curated, and often completely fake.

Social media is toxic, and studies have consistently found that engaging with social media has a negative impact on mental health. People always post only things they think will look good, so they know that what they're putting out there is fake in the sense that it doesn't reflect the full reality of their life. That creates feelings of hollowness, even if the poster doesn't recognise it. And even though they know their social media image is phoney, they still assume that what they see on others' feeds reflects the reality of their lives. That creates feelings of failure and disappointment, so they focus on chasing more surface glitter, and more Instagram-ready meals and backdrops for their selfies, when what they could be doing is thinking about what they really need out of life in order to feel good about themselves and their place in the world.

People who think you're weird for not having Instagram are simply doing the usual human thing and following the herd. The fact we're here is proof that human society functioned reasonably well for about seven million years before some cunning businessmen realised the potential of the Internet to push some psychological buttons and make money out of it. It seems to me that if you lose friends because you're not constantly engaging/competing with them on Instagram, then they're probably not the sort of people it's worthwhile socialising with in any case.

Of course, having said all that, I'm more than forty years older than you, and so I'm a fossil that knows fuck-all about life for teens these days.

Nothing wrong with that. I don't understand wby people are so focused on *everyone* seeing how important they are.

I have facebook and instagram, but they're private. I only want to be able to show things to friends and family overseas. I don't care about likes or hashtagging things to death. I can't see hashtags as anything but attention seeking bullshit.

I was like you...no IG at all. A friend would keep sending me funny videos from instagram until eventually I downloaded it just to see more. I think it's one of the coolest social media platforms because I can 'follow' accounts of interest and relate to the content. I seriously love my IG feed. It inspires me! It makes me laugh! That being said, I only follow accounts that promote content rather than people, I'm so not interested in what flavour ice cream someone ate with their 5 friends staring at me and putting on fake smiles... so I mute many of the people I follow. As for my profile, I have 0 posts. I'm also not one for attention and I like to share my life with my close network of friends, rather than complete strangers (yeah I'm such a hypocrite rn) XD

Of course it is. I only opened an Instagram account last week and that was only to follow my celebrity crush.

I aint got no instagram, tweet, facebook or nun dat shit.

What ya want me to bitch about what people post then do the same thing.

I miss myspace, the cool one

Some people have every single social media known to man, on top of their list of websites they created.
On youtube videos, it takes several minutes to explain how you should go check out their other social media accounts.

How do they have time to keep up with all that shit?

I remember back in the days of chat rooms being the big "social media", people would sometimes meet real life. I always joked that it would suck because you would end up seeing just the back of their heads as they rotted away on the computer all day.

I'm not interested sharing my life with a bunch of stangers. The only things I want to share with someone are either done in person, where I'd say I had a great vacation, or whatever, or send them pictures on messenger.

I dislike instagram. My girlfriend loves it. She loves posting nonsense in it and pretending to be richer than she is... We go out, she posts a picture of her hand with some fancy nail polish gripping a glass of wine, naturally saying the wine is more expensive than it really is...

She did a lovely selfie in front of my E420 with the caption "My sweetheart loves me so much", except that car is mine... I don't let her drive the car and it's gonna be locked up in a garage until next summer.

I don't have an instagram and I don't want to have one. It's perfectly normal to not have one.

Boojum pretty much covered it there. You're not missing anything, my feed was full of people's dinners. I post pictures of cool rocks but if it doesn't have an avocado in it nobody cares.

It's normal. Sometime social media can be very bad. I only have facebook and WhatsApp and I'm just fine :)