The Reality Behind Instagram Feeds — The Bold Italic — San Francisco

By Drew Hoolhorst

The creation of Instagram made us all photographers. We began to see beauty in the simplicity. We began to…

Just kidding. It made us all huge fucking liars.

While it’s a magnificent outlet for all of us to share the way we see the world and all that, Instagram is mostly a gigantic contest to see who’s the best at being a lying liar pants. If you can make a dog look good in Mayfair, if you can make a sunset look like a Picasso when it’s doused in Brannan, all of a sudden, you’re a professional fucking photographer. And that’s really, really insulting to photographers.

It’s funny, right? We have some inflated sense of jealousy about each other’s lives these days because we sit at home looking at a feed that tells us that we are missing out on EVERYTHING and that Brian has BILLIONS of dollars because VACATION AGAIN and SARAH IS THE HAPPIEST FUCKING PERSON ON THE PLANET BECAUSE SHE IS ALWAYS AT BRUNCH.

The funny thing is, we have no idea what’s going on in anyone’s lives anymore. You can fake anything on Instagram or maybe tell a pictorial game of two truths and a lie with just about anything.

I love Instagram. I think that, in a sense, we all do. But I also love to look at it with a grain of salt — mostly because, if you put into context what’s actually going on in most of the photos, it’s really, really funny.

I know this because I did it with mine. See slideshow above.