Every now and then, I post about desert road trips on Instagram. There was the Cadiz Road trip in early 2020 that I walked through in ten posts; the Disaster Trip I took with my friend Chelsea, which I wrote about for my first article on this website, condensed into two; a few pics from a magical morning wandering through Yucca Valley, which I opened with the words, “Good Lord, MORE desert pictures?” It feels weird and hollow to say it, but I’m proud of these posts — they’re all, in some way, reflective of who I am. My love for these kinds of experiences, I feel, helps communicate the Essence of Kyle Keller in a way that I want to encourage.

More and more, though, I’ve started noticing a side effect from these posts: people assume I know what I’m doing. Once in a while, someone will express a desire to go on one of these trips with me. (A guy I hadn’t talked to in years reached out to me after my Cadiz posts and asked if I could take him next time — I hesitantly said yes, and we haven’t spoken since.) What’s more common, however, is the “oh man, I wish I could go on a trip like that!” or “oh, I need to get out more!”-type responses — the ones where, at best, people are inspired by my posts and use them as motivation to do cool stuff, and at worst, where people use my posts to see inadequacies in themselves. Inspiring people is wonderful! But making people feel bad? It’s disturbing, especially considering the nonexistent ideal they’re comparing themselves to. On several of these trips, I screwed up bad, made mistakes that left me wondering who the hell I thought I was and whether I even deserve to be out in such beautiful places. The conceptions that people tended to have of these trips felt so far removed from reality  — a reality that was often miserable, difficult, and shortsighted — that I began to wonder if I’d done anything deliberate to mislead my (admittedly tiny) audience. But I didn’t. All I did was cut it down.

When people are given a couple photos and a caption, they fill in the rest with their imagination. Considering that people already choose to display their finest moments, this effectively severs the post from reality — even if an experience was pure hell, all it takes is a few well-timed photos and a caption that doesn’t go too far into detail for an audience to see the best in it. This gives rise to the symptoms of crippling self-doubt and self-hatred that are common in heavy social media users — which is a serious problem, of course, but it’s also been studied to pieces. The question I find myself asking is, can we cut off that built-in envy from the get-go? Can we, as both the creators and the audience, take effective action to make our platforms more honest? Or is painting an inaccurate portrayal of your life an inevitability intrinsic to the platforms we’re using?

We all know someone who’s a little too honest on social media. They take to Instagram or Twitter to voice anything and everything that comes to mind, especially when they’re at their lowest points — I’ve seen the term “sadposting” spring up over the past few years to describe the kinds of dramatic, onerous, white-text-black-screen lamentations, short passive-aggressive stabs, and attempts at dark humor laced in self-pity and self-flagellation we all come across from time to time. Content like this is a major faux pas. I haven’t seen one yet that didn’t cause me to grimace in both sympathy and shared embarrassment, knowing all too well that the person behind the post would both come to regret the impulse and, unfortunately, never escape it. To counteract such public humiliation, most people take to what Adult Society has been calling “finstas” — ultra-private Instagrams designed for incessant, incomprehensible venting — but even those might come back with a nasty bite. Anyone with access to the account has the ability to screenshot the most secret, personal bits of a poster’s life and share them for the world to see. I find myself thinking of those “ultra-secure” diaries with cheap locks on them that some of us used as kids — you can try to keep its existence a secret and thoroughly vet who has access, but when it comes down to it, someone who really wanted to could break that lock, tear out those pages, and tape your most personal and embarrassing thoughts on the refrigerator with minimal effort.

Is going this ultra-personal route honest? Yes. But debilitatingly so. We all have dark, dismal thoughts, but they’re not meant to be aired — they’re meant to be had and moved on from. So complete honesty is out.

The opposite end? Dishonesty. But the way this dishonesty expresses itself is far more nuanced than we’d might expect. Sure, there are people that knowingly create strange, nonexistent alternate realities on their social media — celebrities and influencers are the usual culprits — that have the capacity to cause major harm to their followers’ self-esteem. They lie because it’s good for business, and sure, that’s screwed up. For the rest of us who use social media for fun, though, we adopt similar tactics of lying by omission and putting our best selves forward for no reason at all other than, well, showing our best angles. It’s just the way social media works, and we know that. Much like we’ve created a shared language for the Internet, we’ve created a shared language of selfhood that defines who we want to show off and, at the end of the day, who we are.

Are we honest? A little bit, sure. Are we dishonest? A little bit, always. And while that’s not by any means a bad thing, it’s worth recognizing the constant, unconscious decisions we make about our image for what they are so that we can learn more about how we see ourselves and how to best express that with as few negative side effects as possible. Maybe there’s an honest, holistic, truly harmless way of using social media, but it won’t arrive without self-reflection about who we are, who we pretend to be, and how the two coagulate into the fictional realities we display (intentionally or not) on our Instagram feeds.

In some ways, perhaps, we can’t help but be honest. Despite the fact my heavy moderation of my Instagram account, there are moments that put fallibilities or moments I’d rather not showcase on full display: jokes that fall flat on their face, for example, or captions that come across as just a little too earnest, a little too vulnerable and revealing. I cringe a little when I look back at these posts — which, thanks to the indexicality of social media, will be around as long as the Internet — but I seldom delete them. Somehow, I find myself treasuring them. They’re reminders that, sometimes, honesty finds a way to creep in; none of us are perfect, and as a result, not even the personalities we create online are perfect. We’re all in the same boat. We’re all human.