BeReal is a breath of fresh air for social media users everywhere.
Breaking away from the norm of performative social media posts on apps like Instagram and Facebook, BeReal gives users a not-always-picture-perfect look into their friends’ lives.
The app is simple: users are notified that it’s time to “BeReal” and are prompted to open the app and take a picture of what they’re doing, simultaneously using both the front and back camera.
No retakes, no getting ready, no posing—just an honest representation of your life in that one minute of the day.
Of course, some people don’t take their photos on time—instead waiting until they’re out doing something fun and dressed to the nines—but that isn’t the point (y’all are fake, by the way).
Apps like Instagram have created a space in which every post and every comment inflicts a feeling of perfection. Posts have become completely performative to keep up a “put together feed” or give the illusion that the user lives a dreamy lifestyle completely absent of flaw.
Occasionally, I find myself entranced by these users—those who resemble influencers with posed pictures and beautiful landscapes, or those who have the I-woke-up-like-this, relaxed, daily life photos while looking straight out of Vogue.
Viewing these accounts to the point of comparing them to yourself is detrimental to the view you have of your own life. Questions of whether your appearance and/or lifestyle should be more advanced can consume you.
Self-esteem issues emerge based on the images of someone else who—listen closely—are completely fake. Pictures are modified and taken to be perfect.
Instagram and other social media platforms contain pictures of the best moments in life. They’re completely absent of the true things in everyone’s life: struggles, flaws, and complications. They’re not real.
I promise she did not wake up like that; that seventeen-year-old is not independently affording her year-long trip to Greece; the girl with super clear skin still gets acne sometimes.
Despite what some people look like on social media, I promise the appearance of their life is not nearly as perfect as it appears. It’s all performative.
That’s the beauty of BeReal. It’s an unfabricated, realistic look into the lives of your peers—proof that, in reality, we have bad hair days, we hang out in our pyjamas, and we’re not always travelling, more often cooped up in our ghetto student houses.
BeReal brings back the relaxed form of social media that we all need. It reminds you of the flawed, weird, totally average life we all live at this point in our lives, and that that is completely okay.
The truth is, there’s no perfection anywhere—not in people, and not in media. That’s where Instagram fails as a social media platform.
What we need is a completely authentic, real-life representation of each other to relieve the online pressure around being the “perfect person.” BeReal shows you that average, complicated, authentic lives are picture-perfect, and I couldn’t be happier.
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