How To Use Instagram

Social media is not for sharing ideas and moments with others; it’s about preserving ideas and moments for yourself.

To start using Instagram, you’ll want to make an account that you force yourself to post to every couple of weeks. After a while you’ll realize that only a couple people acknowledge the posts and even less will bother to comment. Don’t panic, that’s a part of the process. Eventually you’ll start to reconsider how you use the platform. Now, you’re going to want to make a new account but do not delete the old one, we’ll get back to that one later.

With a brand new account ready to go, you can post a picture. It doesn’t matter what the picture is but what you’re taking a picture of should in no way reflect what you were doing - simply take a photo of a forgettable detail of something around you. At this point, feel free to throw as many filters onto the photo as you would like and add a caption that’s only mildly related to the picture. Keep this up for a few months until you decide that it feels kind of forced and pointless.

Eventually you will start to wonder why you’re doing this. Again - don’t panic, that’s perfectly normal. It may start to feel pointless, forcing connections with people online. The relationships and the people are so complex, watering them down to a handful of pictures and captions takes away everything that makes them special. Now we’re all so uncomplicated, we are just a bunch of abstracted characters that have been relegated to bullet points we happened to have shared.

You will start to look through your posts, wondering how you presented yourself. You might have expected to see over simplified presentations of you but that’s not what you see. Looking at you’re first post, you see a tennis court with autumn leaves scattered around. While the picture only shows what the camera was pointed at, you can see yourself behind it, taking the photo. You will start to think about what you did that day. You weren’t playing tennis; you were skateboarding around the court. In fact, it was your first-time skating without the help of a friend. After that picture you walked to park’s water fountain and sat down to post it. You struggled to think of a caption, so you waited there, enjoying the breeze until something came to you.

This is around the point where you should scroll up to the next picture you posted. You’ll have a similar experience for this post too, as well as the two following. One by one you relive these days that you couldn’t have forced yourself to have remembered previously. There wasn’t always something especially interesting those days but the instant you see the picture, you remember everything.

After a while you’ll switch over to someone else’s account and bring up a random picture. It’s of your friend with someone you don’t know out getting food. Since you won’t know them, you’ll start filling in blanks. Maybe they’ve known your friend longer than you have? You also won’t know the situation, so you’ll try to fill that in too. Maybe they ran into each other for the first time in years? You’ll start to look at other pictures with the same interest in the context that you had for yours - except this time you don’t know it.

Let some more time pass, you’ll want to think about this some more. Feel free to continue to post, if you feel inclined to delete posts because they have too many filters on them or remove the captions that only distract from the feeling the picture created then go for it.

At some point you’ll want to go back to your first account. When you do, you’ll see a picture of a gaming console that you got one Christmas. Right then, you’ll be reminded of an entire narrative in your life you had forgotten; getting the console, playing it for hours, having friends over for an all-nighter, and eventually selling it and replacing it with your current one. That’s when the purpose of social media will sink in.

You’ll now start to only post pictures that don’t mean anything, except to you. You’ll only post pictures that remind you of the day you took them. Some pictures will be of an important day but the great ones will be for an unimportant day. One day you will want to be able to remember the nothing days that make up the body of our lives. The times you normally think to take a picture are the times you tend to remember anyway. So now you take a picture whenever you realize there’s no need to take one. You can then post it on Instagram where it will live until you go back and get to remember a day no one else would.

#howto