I run several social media accounts. I have an X account that I have managed since the platform’s early days in 2009, a Facebook account that I started around the same time, and a Brunch account I began using about ten years ago because I liked its focus on writing. I also started Instagram in 2021 when I began living in the UK, and most recently, Threads. I maintain accounts on nearly every major social media platform centered on writing.
If you look at these accounts now, you will notice one unusual thing. I do not follow anyone on any of them. There is a clear reason for this. I am convinced that observing other people’s lives online offers no real benefit to my own life. In short, I do not watch other people’s daily lives on social media.
Before explaining why, let us first reflect on what happens when you observe other people’s lives through social media. You inevitably end up comparing your life to theirs. Comparison leads either to a sense of superiority or a sense of inferiority. Some may argue that feelings of belonging or similarity should be considered separately, but even those are merely a form of superiority mixed with exclusivity. I will address issues related to superiority later. For now, let us focus on the inferiority that arises from peeking into other people’s lives on social media.
It is the feeling that you are somehow worse off than others. When you confront the uncomfortable fact that others seem to be doing better than you, the inferiority that bubbles up soon turns into dissatisfaction with your current reality. Dissatisfaction is not always a bad thing. At times, it can work in a positive way. This happens when dissatisfaction becomes a driving force that pushes you to identify causes within your own life, correct what is wrong, and move toward something better. In such cases, you reflect on yourself, examine the source of your lack, identify the essence of the problem, and attempt to resolve it.
The negative side appears when dissatisfaction grows so intense that it breaks your will to improve altogether. From here, the situation can unfold in two ways. One is attempting to resolve the sense of lack through more instinctive and immediate methods. If you push yourself hard enough, you may be able to narrow the gap on the surface. For example, you might temporarily satisfy your vanity by purchasing luxury items that do not suit your actual circumstances. The outcome, however, is the waste of valuable resources that could have been used to genuinely improve your reality.
Another negative outcome of dissatisfaction is limiting yourself to vicarious satisfaction through other people’s lives. This happens when the gap between you and the person you envy is so large that you know no method will ever allow you to imitate them. For instance, you might look at the Instagram account of a sports star who owns supercars and private jets and imagine what such a life must feel like. After briefly spending time in this meaningless way, you swipe your screen and move on to another piece of stimulating content. Once again, you waste precious resources from your real life, especially time, which can never be recovered.
The positive and negative aspects of social media always coexist, but depending on the person and their environment, one side inevitably becomes dominant. Which side prevails is decided by a struggle between reason and emotion. From experience, we know that emotions exert a far stronger influence over reason than the other way around. I understand rationally that the lives displayed on social media are carefully edited, but the envy that arises the moment a glamorous daily life catches my eye is not something I can easily control. That is why I chose to solve the problem by not following other people on social media.
But what about the opposite case? Not observing others, but becoming the object of observation myself. Thankfully, over the past five years or so, I have had many so-called Instagrammable experiences, from appearing on broadcasts to living abroad. Before I realized it, I was selecting photos from my phone gallery that I could upload to Instagram and Facebook at the same time. I tried to make them look as impressive as possible, hoping others would feel a sense of envy. I admit that I enjoyed the attention to some extent. I imagined how someone with only a flimsy connection to me on Facebook might feel when seeing those photos. “They’ll probably think I’m doing pretty well,” I assumed. That someone might be a high school classmate I had not spoken to in over a decade, or a coworker I had eaten lunch with just the day before.
There is an undeniable thrill in imagining the gaze of others watching me enjoy moments they rarely experience, strokes of luck I happened to receive. I show my happiest moments to others and quietly hope that they will feel envy because of them.
At some point, however, I began to question what any of this was for. Why does it matter what someone feels after seeing my photos? More importantly, I started asking myself whether the impression others form from those photos truly represents my life as a whole. It was hard to deny that it does not.
Soon after, a sense of emptiness followed. Uploading carefully captured special moments to social media as if they were my ordinary daily life is a form of exaggerated advertising, and at its core, an act of deception. Deceiving others is as unpleasant to me as being deceived by them. In the end, it means admitting that I am no different from the kind of deceitful people I once despised. Others may not know this, but I do. That is what matters.
The consequences that my envy-inducing photos bring to others are not healthy either. They lead directly to the negative effects of social media: temporary gratification of vanity or vicarious satisfaction born of helplessness. These are precisely the situations I sought to avoid by not following others on social media. If that is the case, how could it be right for me to create conditions that push others into those same traps by posting my edited daily life? Causing others to experience what I myself wish to avoid is never desirable.
At the same time, I began to wonder whether I really need to turn myself into an exhibit. Do I really have to? Why? I am already a valuable being simply by breathing and living here. I am not an object placed on a display shelf. So why would I willingly become an exhibit, whose very reason for existence is to be seen by others? Is it just to pick up the crumbs of pleasure that fall from other people’s envy? My life is far too precious to waste time like that. I only have one.
That is why I have stopped uploading photos to social media these days. I do not know. Perhaps someday my 마음 will change again, and I may post a photo simply to signal that I am still here, alive, and living, sharing a brief and modest update. But not for now. Just as I do not want to be shaken by other people’s social media, I do not want to shake others who are doing their best to live their own ordinary yet precious lives with the photos I post. Shaking others or being shaken by them are both futile acts.
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