Why I Don't Like BeReal

Since around June, I have been undergoing a journey that focuses most of my energy on self-improvement, and quitting social media has been a part of this experience. A few months ago, my friends convinced me to download BeReal so that we can share our selfies and general life stuff between our friend groups, something I admittedly missed from being on Snapchat before. If you are reading this and you were wondering why I deleted the app a few days ago, I mainly just found it boring and I also think there are some other bad things with social media in general that I would like to share with you.

To give you some background on why people like me have started to abandon social media and other types of indulgences completely, let’s first look at a couple of graphs.

Looking at these timelines, we can first assume that suicide rates are a rough measurement of the state of mental health in our country. We can also note that the dotcom bubble peaked in 2000, so we can assume that 2000 could be considered a major marker pointing to when the internet first became popular. Examining this, it’s easy to be suspicious that the “internet age” and the zeitgeist that continues to build with it might be a major reason for the 21st-century degradation of mental health. Unfortunately, it goes past suspicion as well. A lot of studies surrounding this topic have directly correlated smartphone usage and social media as having a mostly negative impact on mental health, and they are starting to associate it with the exacerbation and even causation of some mental disorders. This article is a great summarized resource and provides a lot of good information and citations to some recent studies in this area if you would like to read more. These types of findings are most concerning to children and young adults since they are on the internet and social media the most and have shown a 71% increase from 2008 to 2017 in total psychological distress. Considering these grim statistics, these topics go beyond just personal improvement and should involve way more discussions on the health of our modern world.

Now that the justification for why I am writing about this is out of the way, I want to persuade you why BeReal is just as worse as any form of digital media. First, regardless of how “real” you are on the app, I would be willing to bet there still is some consideration on how people see you on it. I will confess that I'm the worst with this when I had the app, and I couldn’t help the temptation to set up my posts to look favorable at that moment. But in the (*often rare*) perfect user case, if your posts are never late and are always reflecting the reality of your environment, you must admit you still care about how other people see you. This is one reason why a large percentage of the population tends to be negatively affected after spending time on social media. It is hard to see at first, but the subconscious automatically attempts to employ similar scenarios online as it does in real-life conversation. This is also how people end up getting dragged online, it’s because they are unconsciously convinced that they are talking to a friend or a select few friends, and then they say some ridiculous thing, and then they get roasted by the entire internet. While this doesn’t apply too much to BeReal, the same – very unhealthy – disconnect can be applied visually here. This brings me to my next point.

Social media isn’t just unhealthy for its inaccurate portrayals and unhealthy comparisons, it is also unhealthy because of the amount of stimulus you receive from it. We all know that all social media is simulated social interaction, but the amount of dopamine you get from visual interaction can significantly influence how you live your life. The BeReal reactions play a big part in this platform because you get to see how your friends are reacting to your posts. This type of simulated incentive has the potential to create long-term, detrimental effects. For example, after scrolling for a few hours on Instagram or the sort, how likely are you to go outside and talk to people afterward? Or even spend time with your family and friends? I’m going to guess that the probability has decreased or gone to zero. On the other hand, restriction of social media is guaranteed to change your life because it will change where you decide to get your dopamine consumption. The restriction of the dopamine you get from digital media has shown to benefit life quality overall, but it is also important to get our dopamine from other healthy channels like cooking, exercising, or going out and talking to people IRL. It’s a long-term migration, but this year I have learned to draw these small distinctions between our online circles and our real social life.

One of the biggest things I have noticed is that the various levels of trust, honesty, love, or any other emotion that we all rely on to gauge our social interactions, don’t exist to the same extent in social media. They never will, due to the complexity of scales and differences for individuals and certain micro-cultures. The internet destroys past cultures this way because it inherently rewards large user groups with an assimilated environment and global group set of social rules. This group identity is more accessible than our previous metaphysical ways of communicating. And since we are wired to believe what others think, we are more likely to believe what people say that subscribe to similar values on these platforms. Therefore, it’s easy for young people to assimilate to the ideologies and values of the most popular creators and influencers on TikTok, Twitter, YouTube, and more - it is the modern newspaper. We are inherently very smart and unique people, but the need to “fit in” is one of the biggest drivers of humanity. Internet platforms continue to get more restrictive as more global social rules are adopted and can destroy the individuality of their users. I have seen that extended use can draw the diverse potential out of people, interfere with their emotional stability, and pigeonhole them into a specific group or status of society.

Also, you must realize that BeReal is only a business. The “anti-social-media” front is only a marketing strategy to get you to sign up. It is reassuring that they currently don’t sell user data, but once their user base increases, that might very well change. I wanted to point out that they, and people in charge of any other platform designed to get users, don’t care if they harm people or are negatively affected by any product they create. By promoting that they are better than other types of social media, it’s a classical strategy to promote trust in their product, regardless of whether it is true or not – infomercial anyone? From reactions to comments, these things create an app where users are consistently checking for updates, which is a great thing from a money-making perspective. I would also be willing to bet that most people with BeReal use another social media app daily as well.

This might have sounded accusatory, but it’s just a contemplation I have had with myself this past month and is primarily a standard that I will uphold myself towards going into the future. I hope that this article gave you some stuff to think about and is beneficial to you in some way. Also, the opinions expressed in this writing are exclusively my own and do not represent any organization, association, or company wherein I hold membership.