In hundreds of years time, when people gather to discuss the decline of early 21st century society and the various cultural moments that led to it, I really hope that they remember to include the news this week that the sister of Love Island star Molly-Mae Hague decided to leave Bali after just 48 hours because it didn’t look like it does on Instagram.
Oh, laugh if you want! Pooh-pooh the news as trivial and trifling compared to say, government super-injunctions, not to mention conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East. But to me, this totally ridiculous and seemingly frivolous story marks the moment that pop culture as we know it completely jumped the shark.
Let me recap, just in case you’ve been distracted by more pressing issues. Zoe Rae is famous for being the sister of Molly-Mae Hague, who in herself is famous for… well, I’m not sure really. Being on reality TV? Selling bobbly, plastic blazers for £140 a pop? Anyway, Zoe’s fame by association has given her a comfortable living as an influencer, with hundreds of thousands of followers and a YouTube channel where she uploads ‘vlogs’ about her life. And this week, she put one up explaining why she and her husband Danny had left their holiday in Bali after just two days.
I watched the full 20 minutes 11 seconds, so that you don’t have to. You can thank me later.
‘Since landing in Bali, something for us wasn’t right,’ explained the 29-year-old, sitting in the living room of their five-star hotel room on the Indonesian island (as well as being bigger than their apartment in Manchester, it also had two bathrooms, his and hers sinks, and a wrap-around balcony overlooking the ocean). ‘We came here with high expectations because we had seen on social media everyone was having such a lovely time… But I don’t think the reality of Bali is shown much at all, and I do think it is down to a lot of influencers posting the more luxury side of things.’
‘I think it is just personal preference,’ continued Zoe. ‘And our preference was that this isn’t for us, and we are making the executive decision to go enjoy our anniversary somewhere we know that we love and can relax and can drink the water without being ill in bed for a week.’
That place is of course Dubai, the adult Disneyland of holiday destinations, where all the bits that influencers like Zoe might not want to show on their social media feeds are kept hidden: the poverty, migrant workers, human rights abuses, et cetera et cetera.
Zoe’s fame by association has given her a comfortable living as an influencer, with hundreds of thousands of followers and a YouTube channel where she uploads ‘vlogs’ about her life
And this week, she put one up explaining why she and her husband Danny had left their holiday in Bali after just two days
‘We can close this chapter and move on,’ added Danny, as if they had experienced a dreadful natural disaster, and not two days staying at a luxury hotel, paying locals £10 to massage their feet.
Now look, mocking influencers like Zoe is much like shooting fish in a barrel. She’s hardly the most offensive or harmful person clogging up the internet, and at least she’s been honest with her followers about her motivation for cutting the trip to Bali short. But I do think we should let this ludicrous, laughable moment be the one where we all step back and remind ourselves that social media – and Instagram in particular – is a complete lie factory. A lie factory that we are allowing to influence our real lives on a daily basis.
It always makes me laugh when I go on Instagram and see someone complaining about the mainstream media manipulating the truth, as if that isn’t the entire point of the very platform they happen to be posting on.
Nothing – and I mean nothing – looks like it does on Instagram. Not Bali, not Dubai, and certainly not any of the influencers who go there. Everything – from the wrinkles on our faces, to the cellulite on our thighs and the problems in our lives – can be filtered out of the façades we present to the world on our phones.
There’s a popular saying – often used as an inspirational Instagram quote, ironically – that you shouldn’t compare your insides to someone’s outsides. But we should remember that on social media, we are not just comparing our insides to other people’s outsides, but their highly edited outsides at that.
The effects of this are not just feelings of self-loathing when we look in the mirror and don’t see a filtered goddess staring back at us. We also, as Zoe Rae has shown, feel a sort of malaise and discomfort when we look out at the world around us and don’t see white sands, crystal-clear turquoise water and drinks with umbrella straws in them.
You can take this even further, and see how many people caught in their algorithms can’t even bear someone having an opinion that differs from theirs. And this is the problem with social media: the gap between the online world and the offline one is becoming so vast that people are falling down it, into increasingly bleak voids of misery and despair.
So let’s take this moment to remind ourselves that you can’t put a filter on real life. You can’t photoshop out the fact that we want to have luxury holidays in places where many of the locals don’t even have access to clean drinking water. Nor can you live in a world where everybody thinks like you. You can certainly try, but there will come a point when you have to experience the real world in all its messy, complicated glory – and like Zoe Rae and her husband Danny, you’re going to be in for a very rude awakening indeed.
