Moonrise Kingdom, 2012. Focus Pictures.
In our new Unfollow column, we take a look at the rise of social media tropes and put a finger on why some of them haunt us, even after we close the app. Call us negative, but we’re positive that sometimes, the only thing you can do to keep sane in our age of overstimulation is mute, hide, and unfollow.
I am unfollowing everyone who is always on holiday. More specifically, I am unfollowing Insta-backpackers. Tanned, with suspiciously blow-dried hair for someone supposedly living out of Vietnamese youth-hostels, Insta-backpackers plague my social media. They roam my Instagram feed, littering it with shots of Ha Long Bay, captioned either “99 problems but a beach ain’t one” (for single backpackers) or “Ha Long BAE” (for those coupled up.)
As far as I can tell, Insta-backpackers are constantly on holiday. They traipse the continents for months at a time with seemingly endless funds and zero responsibilities back home. They are unemployed, untethered citizens of the world, who I am, of course, unspeakably jealous of. But not for the reasons you might expect.
Garden State, 2004. Fox Searchlight Pictures.
I concede that there is something so breezily romantic about packing it all in and moving to Greece, armed with only my dungarees, gypsy blouse and neatly angled straw hat (my fantastical alternative reality is a little more than loosely inspired by Meryl Streep in the various Mamma Mia films). But, and this is what bothers me the most: deep inside heaves a boring and nagging monster who whispers, “moving to a ramshackle barn in Kefalonia wouldn’t satisfy you, you wouldn’t know what to do with all that freedom.”
Insta-backpackers represent everything I, the ultimate creature of habit, know I could never be. Their social media pages unfurl before me; a filtered advertisement for a life of unshackled fun, one that I know I personally could not sustain.
Instead, I crave structure. There is something so wonderfully ordinary and familiar about the everydayness of routine. It is a part of me that feels dull and undesirable. Why am I not the sort of person that is reckless enough to reject expectations and travel the world aimlessly? Why is it that the five-month period I did spend travelling was defined by sunburn and homesickness? Why do I love mundanity and hate adventure?
This is certainly not a question of work ethic. I do not yearn for routine out of a desire to be productive. Instead, my reticence around travel stems from a general desire to keep things just as they always have been.
Mamma Mia, 2008, Universal Pictures.
I have never liked change (I once cried when, as a six-year-old, I came home from school to find my bedroom curtains changed without any prior consultation) but the older I get, the more I find myself revelling in small acts of boredom. Boarding the same clunking train every morning, laughing at the same podcast every Wednesday, drinking in the same spot with the same friends every weekend. These are the little endeavours, unfathomably ordinary, I marvel at, as I sit, beaming in the pub, listening to a friend tell the same story for the fiftieth time, each performance slightly tweaked and more exaggerated than the previous.
I have always felt that there is something decidedly romantic about familiarity. Maybe it stems from my growing up in London. In a city so sprawling and overwhelming, your choices of what to do, where to go and who to see, become endless. How are you supposed to settle on a favourite, local restaurant when you live off of a high-street? How are you then supposed to process the crushing dismay when, after triumphantly announcing that “yes, this is my favourite, authentic, charming, local Italian restaurant”, you learn that ‘Strada’ is in fact a chain?
For some, the infinite choice of London is intoxicating and enticing. For me, it is an exhausting process of trial and error, a cosmopolitan obstacle in my ongoing quest for stability. By the time I finally found people and places that felt familiar, it was as if had done my backpacking.
Insta-backpackers fill me with dread then, because to imagine a life so carefree and rudderless, is to remember the years I spent feeling uncertain and lost. I salute them, envy them even, with their unrelenting zest for life; but for now, I’m unfollowing them.
Anything you’re cutting out of your social media diet? Send your pitch to kathryn@sleekmag.com.