even worse: Maintaining a social media presence arguably asks even more of us than a day job that digitally bleeds into early mornings and evenings. In a new effort to stem users’ soul-sapping compulsion to strive for their peers’ approval, Instagram recently decided to make the number of “likes” on posts invisible to “reduce pressure” on users. They’re hiding likes already in six countries – Australia, Brazil, Ireland, Italy, Japan, and New Zealand – to lighten Instagram-induced anxiety. In the Instagram age, leisure is also work: There is no rest.
your ex, your in-laws, and a billion so-called strangers can instantly scroll past, or pause over and screenshot, it’s not just your look that needs to be Instagram-worthy at all times – but your composure, on every level, all the way down to your blood-alcohol content. Compared to other old-fashioned habits to die at the hands of a generationally endemic social media fixation – like talking to each other during meals or enjoying a sunset without having to post a picture of it – habitual heavy drinking may not at first seem so great a loss. We’ve long known millennials – the sober, sexless, nevertheless burnt-out generation – party less than their generational forebears. “Wellness oriented” and “sober-curious” are the favored catch-all terms for the trend. The thing is, now that the whole cohort’s come of age, we have enough evidence to be worried about them. Anne Helen Petersen, in a Buzzfeed News essay, describes the phenomenon of millennial burnout as a generational affliction no number of Aperol Spritzes can fix. Professionals in their twenties and thirties are finding themselves prematurely over it: Expensively educated and gainfully employed, or at least working off student debt, they’re reaching the frayed ends of their psychic endurance sooner than makes sense to their elders or themselves. Being “always on” workwise – the expectation that we be available to answer clients’ and supervisors’ e-mails at all hours – could be the culprit, Peterson partly concludes. “Why am I burned out? Because I’ve internalized the idea that I should be working all the time,” she writes. But being “always on” socially is somehow
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It’s not just that your look needs to be Instagram-worthy at all times – but your composure, on every level, all the way down to your blood alcohol content.
Maybe millennials’ growing distaste for alcoholic misadventure just shows how much we’ve matured. But somehow, I don’t think so. All I can see through the Aperol-tinted rearview is how much we’ve lost: Of all the things social media, and the first generation to be molded by it, have reputedly killed – from nightclubbing to infidelity – a stiff drink seems like one we could really use right now. As this summer’s trendiest drink – what with its ubiquity both online and in real life – won’t stop reminding me, millennials, social media, and alcohol weren’t always this way. The dawn of my drinking career slightly preceded social media’s complete stranglehold on my generation’s sense of self. There was a time – I swear – when shameless celebration of doing what we weren’t supposed to was the whole reason to log on. Social media
American Consequences
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