Let’s Leave Toxic Online Bragging In 2019

As you’re probably aware, the end of the year is looming and in a few weeks we’ll be in a different decade, a reality which has, predictably, spawned a variety of memes. On Twitter and Instagram it’s currently very popular to share a picture of you from 2009, next to a picture of you from 2019. This is, broadly speaking, a chance to show off either how incredibly hot you were in 2009 and how incredibly hot you still are, or how much you’ve glowed up in the last decade.

Similarly, there’s a popular quote tweet or Instagram slide which reads ‘there’s only one month left of this decade, what have you achieved?’, above which people are sharing with things like ‘got married, got promoted, bought my first house, had two beautiful children’ etc, etc, etc. Not just one brag, but an entire list.

If the last decade has been kind to you, then that’s great, really it is. Congratulations on the house/kids/job/Nobel Prize. But clearly what you haven’t achieved in the last decade is an ability to enjoy your own success without relying on a meme.

There’s nothing wrong with being pleased or proud of your life’s work. In fact it’s lovely. Many of us view our lives as smoking piles of wreckage, so if you get a warm smug glow when you look around at the furniture of your existence then you’re doing well. But perhaps you should ask yourself why you feel the need to wait for a formatted internet opportunity to discuss it?

Blaming social media for your problems is boring and lazy, and often untrue. I remain unconvinced that social media has killed even half of the things that it is accused of killing (our sex lives, family units, careers – the list goes on). But in the case of bragging and showing off, social media does actually have quite a lot to answer for. The 2010s were the decade during which the #HumbleBrag was invented.

Social media provides a platform upon which you can present your life as idyllic. And because everyone else does it, we all do it. Round and round the circle goes until we all believe that we’re the least happy people in our social networks. And these end-of-the-decade round-up memes are the zenith of this bad habit.

So far I’m yet to see anyone sharing a picture where they look worse than they did in 2009, even if the decade has left you with wrinkles and weight gain alongside all the triumphs. Similarly, these lists of achievements are all triumphs with no explanation. No ‘I got promoted to CEO but p.s. that meant missing every single one of my kid’s school plays’, or, ‘I bought a house, but I did it by living with my parents and sacrificing all my privacy and independence for five years’.

Sure, there are those who try to make their online lives more relatable, but a caption about how tired you are underneath a picture of your perfectly turned-out children, or a caption about 'body positivity' next to your perfectly toned body in a bikini, is still a brag. It's just a disingenuous one.

Perhaps it’s fitting that we are finishing a decade which we spent showing off online, by showing off online. But 2020 is a fresh start. A blank page. Perhaps we could try and go into it with a more honest attitude to our bragging. If you want to make a big fuss about how brilliant you are, then do it. Perhaps consider being honest about how you achieved your big win. But don’t dress it up as some kind of public service.

Next decade, let’s share pictures where we look beautiful with the caption, ‘I really like how I look here’ rather than pretending that we’re striking a blow for body positivity. Let’s take to Twitter to say ‘I nailed this’ rather than the pseudo cutsey ‘So, I did a thing’. There is nothing wrong with using social media to sing your own praises, especially as women. But if we want to make the internet a less toxic place, let’s learn to brag with integrity.

SEE: Celebrities' first Instagram Posts.