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Comment by ajsnigrutin | Hacker News Reader

The biggest problem with instagram (well and most other photo-based social network) is not the fame and glory of a few individuals, but a selective showing of the best highlights of other people.

Imagine sitting at a shitty job, going to the bathroom, and browsing instagram... hey look, here's Alice eating at a fancy restaurant.. here's Bob on a beach... here's Cecilia at a party... here's Doug moutain climbing... and you're stuck at a shitty job.

Instagram doesn't show eg. Bob working for months to save up for a trip to a shitty seaside location, hotel with bedbugs, overpriced cocktails and a sewage flowing into the sea just out of the visible part in the photo... but you don't see any of the bad stuff, just other people having fun, and you having to deal with all the bad stuff. Add all the filters, and all other people are pretty, have nice skin, look skinny.. and you look like shit after 7 hours on the job and one more to go.

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This kind of reminds me what I experienced during my first travel to south america. In short, most people I met with shitty jobs or no job wanted to go to either north america or europe. They kind of assumed everything would be fine if they just could go to one of these countries. What they totally forgot is that we had to work our asses of to actually pay for the flight and 2 months or backpacking. At home, we had 9to5 jobs, something the people we talked to would actually consider slavery...

This is what a lot of immigrants during the "refugee crisis" thought too... pay the smugglers a couple of grand, then they come to germany, get a free house, free money, buy a bmw.

Everyone knows that though.

I mean, a generation or two ago, it would be a literal vacation slide show you might be "treated to" when visiting a friend. Obviously they never showed slides of Bob at the GM assembly plant.

But that was once in a month occurence, not 6 times (or more) per day. And it was one coworker, not tens or hundreds of your friends and "friends"

And in the days before budget airlines most people accepted it that an overseas vacation was a bit like that for national lampoon vacations: working stiffs working hard and after years at the job “earning” a vacation. Not jaunts you did while between dead end jobs.

You're right that there is difference in degree. But I don't think that changes the fact that we should already accept that what people post to Instagram are the highlights of their lives and not the drudgery.

It's not a question of acceptance, but rather on the effects it has on people psychologically, whether or not they accept it. Humans don't just operate as rational beings – our brains' perceptions of the world adapt and change based on the things we see and how often we see them. Being aware of this effect is not enough to overcome it, much like being aware of the effects of hard drugs does not prevent you from forming an addiction. It is simply how our minds work. It affects people to varying degrees, but the only way to guarantee avoiding the effect is to avoid such situations in general.

But a generation or two ago you had context. You knew Bob worked in an assembly plant 6 days a week with tons of overtime sacrificing family time or took that vacation after 3 years and stayed in a cheap hotel to enjoy an amazing beach.

With social media you do not have that context, you just see the perfect parts.

I don't think people do know it - or even if they know it rationally, some low-level part of their brain thinks it's all real.

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