Make Instagram Casual Again!

I'm sure you can remember a time in our lives when posting on Instagram seemed to be a rare occasion. Whenever it did happen, all details had to be meticulously planned out beforehand: like the time you were going to post, how it was going to look in your feed, the caption, the filter, etc.

As a society we have gone through countless trends, aesthetics, and styles on social media. In 2012, all the rage was taking pictures from the internet and uploading them to your feed, while occasionally sprinkling in a blurry selfie here and there, the go-to filters were either sepia or black and white, and the more random, the better.

Fast forward a couple of years and Instagram had become something completely different and quite frankly, not the best place to be. Feeds were now color coordinated and pictures were photoshopped into something unrecognizable. The app had suddenly become a pool of people competing with each other to see who had the most picture-perfect life.

Casual posting is returning to the very core of Instagram

, casual posting is taking a picture and posting it to your feed without a second thought and not over-filtering your content. Gen-Z is the biggest advocate for this trend since it's a big movement on TikTok with over 1.7M views. Influencers like Matilda Djerf and Emma Chamberlain have definitely taken a liking to the trend and have started uploading unfiltered photos along with "photo dumps" (which are a series of pictures that could have nothing to do with each other that people compile randomly and post.)

The pandemic was a big trigger for casual posting on Instagram. It allowed people to take a hard look at themselves and others they look up to and think about whether or not they really want to know which private island Kim Kardashian is hosting her birthday party on this year with everything else that's going on in the world.

Instagram is a source of self-hatred and destructive comparison for a lot of people. Seeing others living this unrealistically perfect life is something undeniably unhealthy for us as humans. Instead, we should pick and choose the people we follow on the app to make sure we aren't comparing our own lives to just carefully picked out snippets of theirs.