Instagram Is Ruining Our Female Friendships

I love the digital age. Most Zillennial girls do. It's let us take control of our narratives and transformed even the most reticent of us into main characters who can perform our 2000s rom-com career girl lives for our friends on the gram. Nobody else can define us now. We can be seen exactly as we want to be, in the most aestheticised versions of our careers: doctor, gallerist, lawyer, writer.

I’m not even talking about the influencers; I’m talking about the laywoman with a private profile pandering only to her friends. She’s accomplished. She’s chic. She’s fun.

And she’s lonely.

Of course she is. We’re all in competition, whether we admit it or not. And the algorithm has ensured it.

Our grids have become visual scoreboards that are tough to maintain, turning our friends’ feeds into competing displays of aesthetic curation. One friend on your feed is in a chic blazer, looking like Anne Hathaway from The Devil Wears Prada while accepting her latest award. Another is an artist at a potter’s wheel, sexily shaping clay with her hands like Demi Moore from Ghost. There’s a chef extraordinaire whipping up gourmet fare and plating it with a flourish that would have Nigella Lawson frothing at the mouth. And finally, the Dreamwife in a flirty sundress, arranging flowers or cooing over her baby as her husband gazes at her with a warmth that would make Conrad Fisher seem insincere.

Each of these images can make one feel hopelessly inadequate. A mini crisis of selfhood and femininity staring you in the face… and it’s only 9 a.m.

We’re All Watching Each Other Instead of Talking

The worst bit is that you’re probably part of the problem. Your latest post has also triggered another girl and ruined her morning latte. It isn’t that either of you hates the other; it’s because the platform is designed to make us feel bad about ourselves. In our vulnerable states, we’re easier prey for the products they’re advertising. You’re more likely to buy that new lip oil when you’re feeling insecure about your life.

Your online persona haunts you off the platform too. Every in-person social interaction becomes underpinned by what we last saw our friend doing online. And it colors the entire exchange. As much as I want my friends to win, and as much as I know they want to see me win, I can’t deny that our relationships were less competitive when we weren’t posting.

We don’t want to be in our villain eras, competing in status games with each other. Women love being in social harmony. We’re the glue of our communities, famously the champions of GNOs and Sunday brunches. But our in-person interactions have become fewer and farther in between. The more time we spend online performing our lives, the less we spend with our girlfriends in person. Rewind to that magical era before the pandemic and recall how often you met your besties for coffee or called them if you were both busy. Now compare that to today. Chances are, there is no comparison. If you’re anything like me, you don’t reach out as often anymore, except to heart her latest story.

It doesn’t pinch us, this lack of interaction, because we have the illusion that we’ve connected with our friend. We’ve sent her our love and good vibes via a like. And on a busy day, shouldn’t that be enough? The truth is, it isn’t. Friendship quality among women has begun to deteriorate. And as we closet ourselves further into our superstar, main-character, solipsist lives, we start to lose our heart-sending feelings for our girlfriends. Their chic outfit, their latte, their work win, and their cute boyfriend stop being endearing and start to grate. An ugly comparison begins. And before you know it, you’ve muted her. Or worse, are subconsciously hate-watching.

From Friend to Fremeny

Watching your girlfriends win used to be fun. Now it feels like doomscrolling; a competitive, soul-draining experience that ends with everyone feeling inadequate. We never used to be this way. In school, a friend’s accomplishment lit you up. You felt happy for her. Hopeful for yourself.

But isolating ourselves into Instagram personas has numbed that feeling. The platform gamifies everything: likes, views, follower counts, turning friendships into status ladders. And because humans are inherently hierarchical, we subconsciously label each other “up” or “down” based on the last post.

Teen girls have it even worse. They’re building friendships with no escape from competition. Studies show younger women report the highest levels of social media friendship jealousy. Watching Mean Girls today almost feels wholesome; at least those girls did their fighting face-to-face, with room for real bonding and resolution. Modern friendships? Not so much. It’s harder to forgive someone whose life you only see in curated snippets. Harder to trust someone you’ve never actually made memories with. Easier to write off a friend when your interactions are purely digital.

The result? Adult women who internalize their emotions and feel quietly suspicious of their own friends.

So what’s the solution? Delete Instagram? Move to the forest?

Tempting, but no.

The Fix Is Not Logging Off, It's Showing Up

I like my grid. Instagram’s many highlight reels have inspired me to up the ante of my life and try out for different triumphs. Those moments of joy and beauty are reflected in my own highlight reel. I wouldn’t want to delete it all to make another girl feel comfortable. And I don’t want another woman to shrink herself to soothe me. The solution then isn’t to make ourselves smaller but to make our friendships bigger. In a sense, IG has let out the inner heroines in all of us and perhaps we just need to learn to work around its design to coexist in harmony.

The way to do it, in my opinion, is to reconnect with the friends who have turned into Instagram acquaintances. Make the effort to make an offline plan: coffee, a hot girl walk, a book club, a movie. Anything in person that allows us to be human with each other again outside of our internet personalities. Initially, spending time together will be prickly since we’ve been turned into subtle competitors by the platform. Resist the urge to size each other up and gleefully note the other’s shortcomings. We’re not competing for likes anymore. This is an offline interaction and nobody’s watching. The only goal is to be friends again.

Let this become a recurrent activity until we each have a group of girls who are going to see us through the peaks and valleys of an uncertain life, with love and support. I know that my mother wouldn’t have made it to her iconic years without her best friends whom I call my aunts. I only hope that I manage to cultivate the same kind of Mamma Mia-esque friendships with my closest girls so that any tragedy life throws at us turns into a musical.

Where We Go From Here

After creating more offline communities and friendships, what we need is greater cognitive awareness while scrolling. When we approach a friend’s feed, we should consciously rewire ourselves to feel happy for her rather than letting our primal jealousies win. Instead of lusting after each other’s lives and feeling inadequate about our own, maybe we should recognize that our friend is posting to perform a particular identity for a deeper reason. Maybe she’s posting that award because she’s trying to impress a boss who isn’t taking her seriously. Maybe she’s posting a pouty selfie because someone made her feel unattractive and this is her way of taking her power back. Or maybe she’s just feeling confident and wants to flaunt a fleeting moment of joy. Whatever the reason, it’s time to resist the psychological programming of the platform, which is designed to make you compare yourself to others, and use it for what it was intended for: social connection.