friends

When I first heard the term Finsta, somebody had to explain to me what it meant. A bit embarrassing for a guy whose career was already several years vested on the tech industry. I admit, when it comes to things outside of work that are (let's be honest) largely unimportant, I'm a bit of a gran! And so too, if I'm honest, was my initial reaction to the entire concept.

Let me get this straight, I asked, you have a main Instagram account that's open to anyone; stalkers, trailer trash, tornado bait, all are welcome to follow, like pictures, leave suck-ass comments and generally feel as though they are in with the in crowd. But then you have a second account, a Finsta, onto which you post pictures that only your actual friends may see. It's the equivalent of having a wall of photos in your hall. You're welcome to see them, but only if I let you into the house. Except the Finsta is an indulgence open strictly to the under 30s, so far as I can tell. I didn't understand it, mocked it horribly even. Until I made one for myself a few months later.

It seemed like the new in-thing to do. Everyone was doing it, so surely I must too? Spoiler alert: it didn't take. It lasted a few months, accumulated just three or so followers and a handful of photos, none of which were particularly scandalous. It was bollocks. But it helped bring to light an important truth for me, one which kindled the fires of my social media hiatus in 2020. Here's the story.

During my late teens and early twenties, I was a lonely and mixed-up train wreck. I idolised many of Scotland's most popular Insta-gays, hoping to get in with the crowd and become one with them. But at the start, I was young, too young in fact to go out to pubs and make friends the old fashioned way. And even if I had been, I was a shy and socially awkward kid, certainly in real life anyway. So what was I to do? What is any young queer kid in my shoes to do? I felt isolated in my real-life social circles, lonely in crowded rooms and utterly terrified. So I surrounded myself with people like me the only way I could, through social media. I spent my spare time accumulating online contacts, primarily on Snapchat and Instagram. I friended them, liked some posts and even commented if I was feeling especially confident, or was black-out drunk. I hadn't met any of them in person, a fact that remains mostly true to this day. Truth be told, many of them I'd only ever see from the waist down, if you know what I mean. But that mild connection, or rather that illusion of connection with people like me, felt better than no connection at all. So I'd sit up till the early hours of the morning, messaging people I'd never met before because I felt I simply couldn't talk to any of my real life friends about this stuff.

I had this vision of becoming a social butterfly and that this was somehow my starting block. I wanted to be the kind of gay that has a huge tertiary circle of mutuals who all like each others pictures, the kind of guy who can turn heads and be recognised at gay bars and clubs across the country. You know the club scenes from It's A Sin? Yeah, that's sorta what I had in mind. Needless to say it didn't exactly turn out like that. 

It's a bit of a cliche, I know that. Not exactly one that's blazened on your mum's tea towels, but a cliche nonetheless. In fact it's not just a cliche, it's a straight up stereotype - and a highly inaccurate one at that. The gay community is, in fact, cliquey and hellish. The social pendulum is weighted heavily on the side of the skinny, white and stereotypically attractive poster boys. Those who are 5'11 and in the BMI danger zone don't really get a look in. Yet it was a crowd I so desperately wanted to be part of. I wanted a seat at the table to rub shoulders with some of the biggest names on Instagram, but instead was simply peering longingly through a narrow peep hole, one which was neither the window nor the door to the soul, just a glaring white abyss into which you send double-taps and follow requests, comments and DMs. And naturally, each of them with their several thousand followers spared little time for yet another attention-deprived queer kid. The worst part being that some of these people were a lot closer to home than I care to admit. 

As a result, my 15 year old self would probably be amazed by the amount of 'friends' (to use the term loosely) I had accumulated by my early 20s. Although I'd met few of them in person, I still felt like we'd all grown up together somehow. And growing up, as everyone must, it slowly became clear to me that I was, to most of them, just another number in their little red book. Just someone to talk to when they wanted something, just someone to send skuddies to when the notion took them, just someone they could ignore until it suited them. I gathered up so many toxic individuals on Snapchat over the years that opening messages in the office without my back against a solid wall was an absolute no-no. I spent years of my life doing this with more guys than I could ever count, nursing something I thought was friendship when really I was being taken for the ride. It was an illusion of friendship, of human connection, that took a long time to fade.

I became a man possessed. I struggled to disseminate my real friendships from the ones I only thought were real. I started name-dropping people into conversations, even though they are effectively complete strangers. This was a lesson that hit home hard one day last year, after a chance encounter with one of Glasgow's more well-known Insta-gays. You know when you're 90% sure that someone has recognised you in public, but just when you're about to say hello, you get the impression that they'd rather fall down a man hole than talk to you. Yeah, it was like that. I slowed down a bit as our eyes locked and the words "Aw, hiya" were about to leave my mouth, when he buried his head in his phone and kept walking. I was kinda pissed off at the time. I was like, he knows fine well who I am, that was just rude. But the harsh lessons are always both the hardest and the most important ones to learn. I suddenly remembered that Logan and I are not friends. We know of each other through the medium of glowing screens, but we have never actually spoken. I shouldn't have expected that to change that day purely from a chance encounter on the street. That day, the dangerous veil of social media revealed itself.

I started to really ask myself why I was 'friends' on social media with quite so many strangers just like him. Drawn in my thirst-trap posts, I had voluntarily signed myself up to periodic updates on the mediocre lives of people I've never even met. Why was I cluttering my life in this way? The number of accounts out there who rely purely on their relative symmetry as a lightening rod to draw literally thousands to their follow counter is unbelievable. Especially when few such accounts out there use this immense influence for good. I mean, we're not exactly talking about hundred's of Bob Geldof's here, throwing concerts to heal the world. Instead, thousands of people have thrust upon them yet another topless mirror pic and receive hundreds of ever-gratifying likes for it. It's nuts. We don't stay subscribed to these people for the sheer naked attraction either. I mean, Instagram's nudity rules are no joke. I've had pictures pulled before and none of them were nearly as graphic as the full frontals from Game of Thrones. So perhaps it's the perfect lighting and angles that draws us to these accounts, but it's the lifestyle we covet that keeps us there. The looks combined with the followers, the social pull, the daily brunches, a seemingly perfect life, brought to you by Instagram. And because these people are often so close to home, the lifestyle seems so very close, within touching distance. So we lap it up, idolising and emulating and playing right into the hands of Sillicon Valley. The platforms may not be the drug themselves, but they are certainly the ones that keep handing us the needle, a toxic friend-like digital presence which holds us back.

It's the perfect, self-sustaining customer-base that any industry would kill to have. That's what makes this marketing strategy so effective. Sell them the lie of a perfect life, have these influencers plug certain brands, place direct advertising periodically throughout your feed and gradually we are warmed to the idea that a perfect life is something that can be bought - and we will pursue it until it literally kills us.

But life ain't perfect, hun. It is gritty and raw and real. It's tranquil and it's chaos, it's simple and complex, boring and exhilerating all at the same time. But above all, it's so very, very short. Time spent idly flicking is time poorly spent. It does not do to dwell too much on the lives of those we do not know. You can't live your life like that. You certainly can't live your life whilst carrying hundreds, even thousands of 'friends' with you every step of the way. Historically speaking, this habitual accumulation of people is a total nonsense, but scientifically it may also be an impossibility.

Robin Dunbar, a British Anthropologist and the current Head of Social and Evolutionary Neuroscience at the University of Oxford, conducted research in 1992 comparing brain sizes to group sizes in non-human primates. With his findings, he coined the phrase Dunbar's Number, after deducing that humans may too have a cognitive limit on the number of people with whom we can actually hold onto social relationships with. He predicted that our "mean group size" is around 148, a figure which is often rounded to 150. So if we work under the assumption that our true friends list has this hard limit, the reason for why we accumulate people in digital portfolios like trinkets on a kitchen shelf is something of a new-age mystery. So not only had an un-friending spree began, but also a hiatus from several platforms in their entirety. Not only was I now questioning the exponential growth of my social media accounts, but also why I clung to so many of the platforms themselves in the same way that I did the people on them.

These apps had each invaded a corner of my life. My screen breaks in work consisted of leaving one screen at my desk, grabbing a coffee and pulling out another screen from my pocket, a ritual I'm sure many can attest to these days. And once that glaring screen, with its messages and push notifications, it's likes, comments and shares, has drawn you in, it can be hard to put it down. So for the first time since my early teens, I really started to be honest with myself. Is Snapchat really doing me any good? Is Twitter?

~ Aedan.