Who would I have been with Instagram?
Rethinking work, life, and meaning in a digital age
When I was 22, I took a volunteer job at the Hopital Albert Schweitzer in Deschapelles, Haiti. This was in 1997, before we all had smartphones and before the internet was widely accessible. There was a phone booth a few towns over. Mail was flown in from a P.O. Box in Florida on Wednesday nights.
The hospital was on the grounds of an old banana plantation. On days off, I’d hike down a dirt road, past colorful houses, and up into the hills. Two decades later, I remember these walks vividly. It wasn’t the beauty. It was the pain. I was so lonely. The loneliness was unfathomable. What good is any of this, I remember thinking, if the people I love can’t see it, too?
I know what I’d do on that hike now, what it is possible to do in even in Deschapelles: I’d snap it, text it, and post it.
I thought about this as I read Tavi Gevinson’s essay on the cover of New York Magazine last month. Tavi is 23. In 2008, when she was 11, she started a fashion blog that grew popular and scored her invitations at Fashion Weeks in New York and Paris. She used her early influence to get into acting, start a teen magazine, and grow a brand as an influencer. One year, a Brooklyn developer even invited her to live for free in a new apartment in return for posting about it.
Tavi’s such an old hand at Instagram that it’s easy to forget that she’s not actually old. Her essay examines her adolescence from the perspective of someone who has just arrived at the front door of adulthood. From the start, Tavi understood experience through its relationship to an audience...even when she was her own audience. On a private Instagram account she made only for herself, and then deleted after two weeks, she writes:
It was the only thing I made growing up that truly was just for me…It existed just to scratch an itch, to satisfy the part of myself that had learned to register experience as only fully realized once primed for public consumption.
Mostly, she focuses on the impact of capturing her life for a growing group of commenters and likers, and trying to decipher her own motives in the process.
There are plenty of well-documented reasons to distrust Instagram — the platform where one is never not branding, never not making Facebook money, never not giving Facebook one’s data — but most unnerving are the ways in which it has led me to distrust myself…I think I am a writer and an actor and an artist. But I haven’t believed the purity of my own intentions ever since I became my own salesperson, too.
In 2017, Tavi outsourced her posting and comment-tending to someone else. It was making her too anxious. By then, she’d already parlayed her early influence into the magazine, Rookie, writing opportunities, an acting career. But the engine that had powered much of her path to success was also making her sick. She wrote that she would pick at her skin.
I am wearing my psychology for all to see. The self-loathing leads to more picking, and the cycle continues.
Quitting the posting helped. She rarely looks at Instagram now, she writes, and when she does, she prefers a laptop computer where she says she gets sucked in less intensely. Her assistant posts comments she should review in a Google doc, and she misses everything else.
Tavi says the approach has made her feel sane.
Since enacting my system, I think about 20 people in a day instead of 500,000.
But she didn’t give Instagram up. Rather, she seems to have evolved with it, a fact she called out in the end. The current Insta-fad is all about being relatable. Memes include #nomakeup #nofilter and #reality. The successful ‘grammers post photos that resemble outtakes, performing authenticity seemlessly. And the most successful ‘grammers write essays about being over ‘gramming for culture magazines.
Tavi has 515,000 followers.
Which brings me back to my Haitian hikes. Two decades later, I look back to those walks as one of a half-dozen defining moments of my life. Grappling with that loneliness that cut to my very core? It taught who I was, what was important to me. It taught me how to perform for an audience of one: myself. Who would I have been with Instagram?
💡Things I’ve made: Hello Monday Episode Two with Jerry Colonna:
Hello Monday Episode Three with Roxane Gay:
🛋Things I’ve read:
Franklin Foer’s profile of Jeff Bezos in The Atlantic: “The incapacity of the political system to ponder the problem of his power, let alone check it, guarantees his Long Now.”
After Prachi Gupta’s brother died, she explores the forces that shaped them into very different people, in Jezebel: “I became a vocal, ardent feminist. He saw feminists as extremists who were deeply hateful towards men.”
🎙Things I’ve heard:
She Makes Money Moves, a new podcast from Glamour and iHeartRadio and hosted by Samatha Barry. Guests break down how they spend their money, and then get financial advice. The advice is less interesting than the actual peek inside the minds (and thus values) of the women making ends meet.
Also, Rachel Botsman’s new podcast on trust promises to be compelling.
🎉Kudos!
Longtime Wired One Maya Draisin has joined TIME as SVP Progress Marketing. As the brand remakes itself under the new ownership of the Benioffs, Maya will bring a wealth of creativity and imagination.
On September 28, GLAAD honored Leadout Capital founder Ali Rosenthal with the Ric Weiland Award in San Francisco. She urged the audience to “be the outcast who bends the arc in a different direction.” In fact, in her career and her life, she has done just that.
Jack and Ashley Reed welcomed Jack Raymond Reed on September 13th. He’s the fourth in a long line of Jack Reeds, and I expect he’ll inherit compassion, intelligence and a sense of humor as well as a name.
Clara Jo Swisher Katz arrived a month early on Friday, October 4. Mothers Amanda Katz and Kara Swisher have yet to paint her nursery, but they’re snuggling the heck out of her.
The 4th was also my son Jude’s first birthday, so here’s a photo of each of them in the same basket:
***So maybe you’re asking, what’s this about again? You're my brain trust. I don't write for thousands. I write to exchange ideas with the small group of people I've met and who matter to me, in hopes that together we can figure out something more about where the world is going and how it gets there. This is a team sport.