It’s 9:36am, and you’ve only got 19 minutes until your lecturer stops prattling on about realism, or relativism, or whatever they were talking about when your brain switched off about 25 minutes ago. You feel that your boredom has reached peak levels. You pull your phone out of your pocket. Absent mindedly, you start scrolling through Instagram, and in your exhausted state you subconsciously take in the pixelated photos on the screen. The images fill the empty spaces in your brain that aren’t occupied by deadlines, that annoying girl in the smoking area last night and what you fancy having for dinner later.

Instagram, and other forms of social media, are the places we go when the last thing we want to do is think. All we want to do is push our problems to one side and focus our exhausted mind on last night’s “girls’ night out” selfies, or a poorly captured sunset on a dodgy iPhone camera. The problems with these forms of social media become apparent when we start taking these images at face value. Because with imagistic media platforms like Instagram, what you see is rarely what you get. What’s represented is often a far cry from the reality behind the deceiving smoke screens of filters like Mayfair, Valencia and X-Pro II.

What people choose to put on Instagram is simply a way of presenting themselves as how they wish to be seen. This, to some extent, is a form of deception – almost like lying by omission. We get drawn into the metaphoric tapestry that people weave to represent their identity and their lives, but within this is only the good, and very rarely the bad. All we get is a snapshot: a group of laughing faces, or a well-filtered selfie. We see the camaraderie at pre-drinks, but not the argument that happened later that night; we see health gurus doing yoga on the beach, but we don’t see them break down with stress and anxiety; we see the smoothie someone had for breakfast, but we don’t see the three pieces of cake they ate later that day.

The fact that our mind is constantly flooded with images that we (almost subconsciously) take in means that we adjust to them, and we learn to see them as part of reality. Our perception of people’s lives becomes as idealised as the fabrications they portray. Because of this perception, we learn to compare ourselves to something that isn’t real. When people paint their lives as a misleading picture of perfection, and we try to live up to that false picture, we will ultimately fail.

It is from this type of falsity that many problems facing young people, particularly those relating to body image, are becoming more and more prevalent. The airbrushed pictures of celebrities on the front covers of magazines aren’t the real issue. We know the magical talents of Photoshop. But what we don’t know is that the photo we stare at wistfully of the girl in her size six jeans may not be all we think it is. Behind the flashy smile and the filter could be a person who is really struggling and crying for help. Or it could be someone on top of the world. The problem is that we can’t know, that we don’t stop to think about whether what people are portraying is the whole reality.

When it comes to viewing our friends’ lives on these kinds of social media platforms, we don’t question the seeming multitude of interesting and exciting things they do. Because our friends are people who we know in real life, it becomes more difficult to reject their apparent near-perfection as the work of a good PR team, Photoshop and a personal trainer. It often becomes difficult to remember that when people post photos, it is a window into perhaps the most interesting and happy moments of their lives. After all, we post photos of ourselves on holiday, but never when we are vegetating in bed with Netflix and a bag of Doritos. We post photos celebrating our successes, but never our failures and rejections.

Instagram is an amazing way of capturing breathtaking, funny and even more mundane images. But we need to take these with a pinch of salt, because often these are representations that don’t truly depict reality. And we need to recognise that our mindlessness regarding what we take in and subconsciously believe could be doing more damage than we realise.

@millayayay