As the Pumpkin Spice Latte makes its grand return to Starbucks’ seasonal lineup and Target runs out of school supplies, mothers everywhere brace themselves for a couple of days of social media fatigue: the beginning of September, when our feeds are drenched in pictures of other people’s kids holding up signs announcing what grade they’re going into. The kids look suspiciously like our own, dressed in that ambiguous it’s still summer, but it’s the first day of school, so it must somehow also be fall attire. Most of the kids are really cute, and you’d pause if you were to come across pictures of them while scrolling through Instagram on a random Monday afternoon while procrastinating from work.
But when your entire feed looks the same, you just want to scroll along. When I post on Instagram, I try to answer the question: Why do I want other people to see this? The answer usually has to do with wanting to show off, which is totally fine.
Given the cultural climate we live in, showing off has become a currency, synonymous with stating your worth, and I don’t think there’s something inherently wrong with posting something because you want the world to see it. I post an article I wrote because I want to show off my work and, ideally, get more traffic. I post a photo from a restaurant because I’m showing off that I’m cool and went there.
I post friends because I’m showing off my cool friends. Sometimes, though, I post something because it invokes so much emotion that I just have to share it and want others to see it. Examples include a book I might have just finished and desperately want to talk about.
But some part of the collective human brain has been disconnected, and we now post things like that to pretend we’re having a conversation and, maybe, if we’re lucky, it will actually lead to one. Sometimes I look at my kids and think they’re so cute, and I’m left with no choice but to blast out pictures of them, like when my son was a baby and wore an AC Milan outfit, the soccer team of my Italian family’s hometown, and, essentially, a religion in our house. Of course, there are the politically inclined posts as well because, again, emotion.
Back-to-school photos clearly fall into this camp: posts we just had to upload because we’re so emotional about them. The mere fact that our kids are going back to school invokes an enormous amount of feeling. First of all, they’re officially a little bit older.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
