I stopped using my personal Instagram account years ago. A social media platform designed to share photos of what you’ve been up to with friends, it quickly became a way to compare your own life with others, most of who you don’t even know, often leaving you wondering why your own life wasn’t as exciting and interesting. Atleast that’s the reaction i got to the platform, and tends to be the general census. I even wrote one of my first blog posts about how you can misrepresent yourself across the internet, as not many people share images of themselves doing all the mundane aspects of life.
When I started this blog it was because I wanted to share my stories, and I know Instagram can be a platform to do that. Now I have two accounts, one for my blog and one for my photography, and I’ve tried to be honest and real about how I get outside to adventure on both of those. I work 6 days a week and have to make time on that free day each week for family and friends, as well as enjoying other hobbies. The whole purpose of this blog is to share ways I get outside more each day, and that’s often been by going for a Cup of Tea Before Work or even Just Doing Nothing. Yet as I continue to use Instagram and other social media platforms to share those stories, I sit and scroll through other people’s content as well.
My feed is full of images the algorithm thinks I will interact with. Professional photography, taken from the peaks of high mountains with dramatic sunsets. A cluster of accounts (who I don’t even follow) regularly gets put on my feed, who are always out ‘living their best life’ in exotic locations abroad. I’ve slipped back into the trap of envying them without knowing anything about their lives, jealous that they’re getting to travel to all these beautiful places, and I have to make do with a walk to the park before work.
Then there is the job of sharing my content. I put up a post where I went out to a local nature reserve 5 minutes from my house and made a cup of tea before work. I had a great morning that day and felt like it was worth sharing because it’s something anyone could do, no matter how busy their schedule is. That post currently has 174 views. Another day, deep into scrolling through reels, I decided to post a clip of me walking along the beach at sunrise, which I had taken months ago when I was on holiday in the summer in Wales. That post has been up half the time of the other one and has over 1000 views and got plenty more likes and comments. I felt like I had been rewarded for re-using old content to show off.
The reality is, I filmed a short video of my 1-week holiday at the beach to keep as a memory for myself and my partner. Yet, I have enough content there to fill out 6 weeks of regular posts on Instagram to show off what I have been doing. Something, by the way, social media coaches will say you should be doing if you want to grow your channel.
Don’t get me wrong, that week away was wonderful and I have photos and videos which will be cherished, but it feels a little cheap to feed the narrative that my holiday was anything more than a week away camping in Wales. I also started this blog to help me spend more time outside, not to spend more time talking or showing off about being outside. I also appreciate that I am lucky and privileged to be able to go for a walk to the park or spend a week camping in the summer, and I should be grateful for that and that’s ok.
That brings me back to this post. The opening couple of paragraphs of this post were meant to set the scene for how I hadn’t been able to access those amazing sunsets on high mountains, to then talk about how I had booked off a day at work to go climb a hill in the Peak District and watch a sunset. It’s instead turned into an observation of social media, so seems a little off-topic to now talk about a walk to the top of a hill, which was to mostly done to feed my own need to feel like I’m adventuring as other people do. Instead, I’ll post that next week, which seems a little hypocritical…
Get Up Go Outside 