Saying no to selfies

The original poser: Narcissus by Caravaggio

Instagram is a mindless pocket-based entertainment source - as you wish you can pull up a feed that reveals, in pictures, the carefully curated and aspirational lives of people you follow. Sure, you can find the odd feed that is brutally, hilariously honest, but usually (and I include my own feed - username theclairelow8 - in this) there's a lot of gorgeous food porn and sunsets and manicures. You know, la vie en rose where the rose is the beautifying filter.

A beloved friend of mine posts shot after shot of himself: his brooding face, his many outfits, his hand holding his phone because he can't seem to resist firing off another shot at his own reflection in lifts, and there are the flashback photos of him with different coloured hair, and at the beach in dark glasses, and on and on it goes. I wanted to do some data analysis and figure out what percentage of images he had posted were selfies; I got worn out by 35 or so. It's a bit wearying and I say this as someone who genuinely enjoys his brand of outsized ego. 

This kind of endless self-promotion is a bit more acceptable if you're a bona fide celebrity - Miranda Kerr, Jessica Gomes and their ilk spring to mind, you know, people who make a living on their looks who really do have legions of fans who will lap up each and every image they post of their beauteous face.

But if you're a narcissist without a fanbase, what is the point of all your selfies? If a selfie floats on the interwebs and nobody hits 'like', does it really exist?

Then there's the over-edited selfie - the suspiciously airbrushed kind, the kind that sparks ire from the friends whose newsfeeds they appear in. Filters are well and good but no filter will obliterate all of your pores and turn you into a perplexingly faux-looking person worthy of The Sims.

I am over selfies. I have been guilty of plenty of them in my time - as overwrought and self-consciously posed and over-filtered as you care. I am as big a narcissist as anyone. Maybe other people find my own photo selection - fingernails and food, trinkets and cats, handbags and jewels - makes them as violently ill as a bucketload of selfies makes me.

Selfies have reached saturation point; they say 'Nothing is more interesting to me than ME.' Time has an article on how the wealthy like to selfie and how narcissists know they are obnoxious but love themselves anyway. Can we please take a break? I think we can't, we can't tear ourselves away from this habit anymore than Narcissus can keep himself from dying as he stares at himself reflected in water.