The last time I felt envious on social media was when I saw one of my best friend’s posts about her weight loss transformation…I was happy for her, but also jealous because I want to be happy with my body in the same way she was.

The thing that made me envious was my friend who bought a car. He kept taking pictures of it and putting it on Instagram. It was getting out of hand for me so I commented “dude stop” and he blocked me shortly after, as if I did something wrong.

The post was a gender reveal video from my husband’s cousin…I was so envious because I have lost three unborn babies. Even if I were to get pregnant again, I would never have the carefree attitude that the couple in the video has.

If you’ve ever had these kinds of feelings while browsing Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, you’re not alone. Social media envy shadows our online lives. It’s so pervasive that there is now a thriving academic literature on the connection between social media usage, envy, and depression.

If social media envy is a widespread experience, however, it’s still an isolating one. We nurse our hurts and grudges in private. But we won’t conquer social media envy until we can publicly acknowledge all the ways it affects us.

That’s why we put the phenomenon under the microscope. In a survey conducted online last summer, we asked more than a thousand Americans to tell us about their feelings as they scroll through social feeds, and to describe the posts that inspired their latest envy pangs.

Our survey, deployed via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, was completed on July 24, 2018. Though our respondents don’t perfectly match the demographics of U.S. internet users, the results still underscore the breadth and depth of the online envy phenomenon. Two thirds of our respondents reported experiencing pangs of social media envy in the previous month. Nearly a quarter said that during that month, they had felt social media envy three or more times.

Even more telling, many shared achingly personal stories about grief, self-doubt, and frayed relationships. These comments suggest that social media has unleashed a deep, pervasive, negative emotional force — something that threatens to tear apart our most precious relationships, as well as the day-to-day social fabric of casual friendship.

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The last thing to make me feel envious on a social network was Instagram pictures of a trip that a friend took to a luxury resort. It even led me to reconsider whether or not to stay friends with them because I feel like I can’t really relate to their lifestyle and hobbies.

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I had a friend who recently posted from Miami, and I have to say I was a bit jealous. I am sitting in NW Pennsylvania with 23 inches of snow outside and she is living it up with a pineapple drink on the beach in the sun.

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The post was about somebody’s “hardest day ever” because her big fancy expensive house that had just gone on the market the previous week and only had 2 offers and her kid was rude to the au pair. Meanwhile we’re struggling to just survive and this kind of person/poster is so ignorant of how lucky they are.

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I saw a picture of the sister of a friend of mine on Instagram. She was on a yacht in Capri, Italy. She was surrounded with friends all laughing and having a great time. It made me want to go to Capri, even if I didn’t have all those gorgeous friends with me. It made me want to take that picture on a yacht with a glass of fresh wine.

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I saw a post of a former co-worker who had gotten a very, very expensive car. Even though I understand that many online posts are done for attention or prideful reasons, I still couldn’t help but feel envious. I was happy for him, but I also a bit embarrassed that he would want such attention.

But there may still be a way out. Amidst the growing interest in digital well-being, we see more experts — and more individuals — charting best practices to avoid or mitigate the experience of social media envy. I’ve spent the past 15 years advising individuals and organizations on how to work with social media, yet only recently have these conversations turned to what people and platforms can do to stem the tide of envy. Before we can conquer social media envy, however, we need to understand it.

Thanks to Instagram, Facebook, and mobile phones, we’re never more than a click away from the evidence that somebody else is living a fantastic life, far better than our own messy existence. Social media gives us constant, immediate access to everything we’re not doing, and leads us to question both our lives and our friends.

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I love to travel and I just saw 8 of my high school classmates going to Singapore for a trip to celebrate turning “40.” I really wished I was there with them on a girl’s trip. I have been tied home with a son who has a disability and had to give up a number of things, travel being one of them.

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It was a post from a wife to her husband expressing anniversary wishes. My husband passed away about 8 months ago and we just had our 30th anniversary. I was so wishing that was me telling my husband.

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Two friends of mine who have significant others posted a picture of them out to eat at a new restaurant near us with their partners. I was envious because I’m single at the moment and feel like I miss out on a lot of social things because I don’t have a boyfriend. I was at home doing nothing and they didn’t invite me.

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An old friend who I have lost touch with posted pictures from a recent all girls trip…I was envious of the strong bond her and other friends have. I wanted to be part of that group. I wanted to be there with them. I wanted the long-lasting friendship that had girls nights and vacations…I want that bond.

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I felt jealous that my friends with kids, have their lives together. Their kids look happy, their homes are always meticulous, they are dressed in amazing clothes, and so are their kids. My kid is usually dressed really cute but I look a hot mess and I only have one little one. I wonder if people get outside help because here there is no help.

If social media envy is now commonplace, however, that doesn’t mean it’s evenly distributed. Jan Crusius is a psychology professor at the University of Cologne, Germany and an expert on social comparison — a field that has turned its attention to social media envy in countries around the world. “Not every kind of person is equally vulnerable,” Crusius says, “In our own research, we found that people who scored higher on depression were more vulnerable to react with envy to attractive Facebook profiles.”

Some kinds of updates seem particularly likely to trigger envy pangs. In our survey, vacation and travel photos were the number one cause of social media envy, followed closely by posts that showcased money, wealth, or lifestyle.

Still, not all envy is created equal. Crusius contrasts malicious envy — “the hostile kind of envy, in which you don’t want another person to have the better fortune” — with the “benign envy” of “Damn it, I want this too!”  

Social media posts tend to trigger the benign form, says Sonja Utz, a professor of communication at the University of Tübingen, Germany and a leading expert on social media envy. “Relationship strength also matters,” she says. “The closer we are to the person who shares positive moments of their life, the more happiness and benign envy we experience.”

Our survey bears out this pattern. Respondents reported that the people who triggered the most envy, in many cases, weren’t their dearest friends. On the contrary: the lion’s share of envy-generating updates came from casual friends. That phenomenon was particularly strong among women, who were twice as likely to be triggered by casual friends than by close friends.

Precisely because it’s now so easy to stay in touch with everyone we’ve ever known, social media increases the surface area of our vulnerability, extending the range of people we can envy and the ways in which we can envy them. When it isn’t homing in on our deepest, most painful hurts, social media envy can inflict a thousand shallow cuts.

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A former co-worker of mine just got a very good job with the city and was bragging about it on Facebook. I was very happy for him, but also extremely envious, because I am at the same job he was at, but he had the guts to go out and land that job. Oh, and he’s making $7 more an hour than I am now, sheesh!

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My best friend recently bought a house, while I (because of financial troubles) have had to move back home with my mom and dad. I was jealous of his back deck, his fireplace, his giant TV above the mantle, the guest room, the other guest room, the office for him, the office for her, the list goes on and on.

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I am part of a group that focuses on a specific way of eating (keto). Quite often, group members post pictures showing their weight loss. There was one woman who is my age and had close to the same starting weight. She has lost a considerable amount of weight and looks spectacular. I felt envious.

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This post was from a direct sales person I follow. She is known to have bullied some former co-workers. She went live to show us her new vacation home and said she was on her way to buy a new boat…It seems some people who are intentionally bad towards others still have a way of getting ahead.

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A friend had posted about their trip to a luxury resort that I could not afford if I saved up for the next five years of my life. They humblebragged about how hard it was to take time off work to go. I have a terrible, menial, low-paying job and they basically lucked into a high-paying, cakewalk job where they get to hobnob with celebrities once a week.

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I know it’s bad, but my best friend posted how she well she is doing…I realize I should have been happy for her but I couldn’t help but feel left out and jealous. I wished I could get that kind of attention and display that level of talent. I didn’t tell her this of course and still liked her Insta post, but still the envy festers inside of me.

That emotional punch can have a real impact on our offline relationships, affecting our feelings for those who would otherwise be near and dear: Nearly 1 in 10 of our respondents reported that seeing an envy-triggering post from a friend or family member actually made them like that person less (though nearly as many reported that an envy-triggering post made them like that person more — proof that some relationships are strong enough to withstand a little online envy.)

Fighting the green-eyed monster

If envy is now a routine part of our online lives, that doesn’t mean we’re powerless against it. The majority of our survey respondents who experienced social media envy also reported taking specific steps to mitigate it.

The most common strategy is to simply go offline. Some also use unfriending or unfollowing as a tool to manage envy, or turn to meditation or self-reflection to get out of the envy spiral. Yet many people in our survey — a third of those who reported experiencing envy in the past month — did nothing to address the problem, and seemed instead to treat social media envy as part of the price of life online.

But we don’t have to resign ourselves to the inevitability of social media envy. It’s up to all of us to mitigate its impact — not just for our own individual sanity, but to ensure that our relationships and communities aren’t undermined by the virtual green-eyed monster. And there are steps we can take to handle our feelings, even as we stay online.

For instance, research suggests that we’re only immobilized or depressed by social media envy when we passively browse sites like Facebook and Instagram, acting like virtual voyeurs in other people’s lives. When we engage with social media actively ourselves — by posting, sharing, commenting, reacting — that depressive effect disappears. We can learn how to revel in our own lives by helping other people celebrate theirs.

That recommendation lines up with my own experience as a compulsive social media user and professional social media trainer and consultant. I suspect one of the reasons I’m only intermittently tortured by social media envy is that my digital habits — I rarely look at my newsfeeds, and spend most of my time reviewing comments people have left on my own posts — insulate me from its worst effects. (On the dangers of social media narcissism, I have no comment.)

We can also rethink what we share. No, it’s not your job to protect friends who might feel envious of your new car or job or hot tub — but do you really want to be the person who regularly makes other people feel bad about their lives? Recognizing the ubiquity of social media envy should encourage us to take some responsibility for the image we project online, which means having some empathy for how our updates affect other people. 

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[M]y co-worker had posted several photographs of himself and his family while on vacation. I was jealous that he was on vacation and having such a good time while I was stuck at work. I wished that my family was as happy as his appeared to be. I felt really silly afterwards because I know that his life is not “better” than mine, only different.

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A friend kept posting about all of these places she always goes. It is more like a fairy tale reading these posts because it just doesn’t seem that any normal working-class person could take these many trips and do as many things. Sometimes she is not even in the pictures that she posts so I wonder if they are all even true.

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The post was about a family who travels a lot, and they were going to a tropical island yet again for all to see. I would love for my family to be able to afford a vacation this summer. We have to be really conservative with our money and therefore cannot even think about going somewhere like a tropical island. I am thinking about closing my Facebook account because of this.

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There was a post on Facebook of someone showing off vacation pics with their children, and husband. It made me feel bad as I realized I will likely never have a family due to my being divorced, and in a tremendous amount of medical bill debt. It is one of the reasons I stopped visiting Facebook daily. It makes me cognizant of the fact that I don’t have very many good things to share about my life.

You don’t need to refrain from sharing your good news, and you don’t need to whine or complain about every setback. You just need to scrutinize the cumulative impact of your profile to assess whether it reflects a generally accurate picture of your life. If you feel like you’re airbrushing your life story, consider injecting some vulnerability into your posts, or setting a quota on how often you allow yourself a brag. (My personal practice is to cap myself at one unrepentant brag per month.)

You might also limit the audience for your envy-inducing posts by thinking carefully about who sees each of your updates. “To avoid inducing envy in others, people should also post mainly to their closer friends,” Utz advises. (You can do this easily on Facebook by using lists to target different kinds of updates to different people.)  “Hashtags can also influence appraisals about deservedness,” Utz says. “#richkid triggers more envy than #workedhard #adreamcametrue.”

Next, consider the psychological impact social media has on your mood and self-esteem. If you have friends who consistently depress you with their fabulous (or suspiciously fabulous) lives, consider unfollowing or unfriending them. I’m absolutely ruthless about hiding people from my Facebook feed if I see more than the occasional post about their dazzling life and accomplishments — and even my most beloved friends may get hidden from my feed for the month of their trek through Thailand. (Yes, I’m happy for them, but I can be happy without dwelling on their joy each and every day of their vacation.)

Once you’ve taken the technical steps to stem the tide of incoming envy, you can start thinking about how to become the kind of noble human being who rises above the lust for someone else’s beach house or beach body. After all, each of us only has so much emotional stamina, so if you use yours up trying not to envy your elementary school classmate for her new Porsche, you may be out of generosity when it comes time to celebrate your current best friend’s latest promotion. 

This ultimately comes down to changing the internal narrative that plays whenever we see someone else getting that new house or new job: the voice that says you are a failure, or at least an also-ran, when you’re not experiencing the same joys or acquiring the same possessions as your friends.

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I have a friend whom I have known since high school. She and her German husband and their daughter travel all over Europe, lived in Costa Rica, and embrace the “expatriate” life. I often wish I could see all the places that she goes to. Luckily, I can live vicariously through her Instagram stories and Facebook posts and, if I imagine hard enough, I can see myself having been a world traveler, too.

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My friend who is a professional guitarist shared pictures of the equipment he had set up in his home…I know he worked really hard to earn all that but it’s my dream to live on my own and have a house to play music in. I asked him if I could save the pictures as a reminder to keep following my goals.

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I myself am an artist, so when I see really fantastic art posts, I do feel a bit envious. But instead of letting it put me down, I let it inspire me to work harder.…Seeing the post made me feel like I wish I was better, and that I need to work harder in order to accomplish what I want.

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[A college classmate] posted about having a great paying job (that they enjoy), a house they just bought, and have already paid off their student loans. While I graduated just a year after them, I have none of these things. It really made me question whether I was being successful and what the very definition of success is.

If you still find yourself bedeviled by envy when you’re surfing the latest Facebook or Instagram updates, remember that envy can be useful — at least when it comes to benign envy, which doesn’t involve hostility. In giving us a new (if often painful) perspective on others, social media envy can bring us back to ourselves. What we see online can and does inspire us to ask questions about our own choices and priorities, like the survey respondent who told us that, while other artist’s successes sometimes inspire envy, “I let it inspire me to work harder.”

“Envy can be quite functional in motivating us,” Crusius says. “Benign envy motivates us to invest more effort, potentially leading to better outcomes.”  Indeed, learning to convert social media envy into fuel — so that it inspires rather than saps us — may be an essential skill for thriving in a digital world.

ABOUT OUR SAMPLE

Our survey was conducted on July 24, 2018, and deployed on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform. Virtually all of our 1,075 respondents use at least one major social network, and 98 percent use one or more networks at least once a week. Our sample skews slightly female (52 percent female, 48 percent male) and also skews young: 75 percent of respondents were under 40 (compared with 38 percent in the U.S. population) and only 12.6 percent were over 50 (compared to 44 percent in the general population).

As with the general population, about half our sample has a household income of 50k or less. But our sample significantly under-represents the most affluent: While a quarter of the U.S. population lives in households with incomes over 100k, only 12 percent of our sample does. Our analysis suggests that income has only a very modest impact on social media envy. However, people with household incomes over $100k reported social media envy at identical rates to those with incomes of $50-100k, and those with household incomes under $50k differed only in being slightly more likely to experience social media envy frequently (25 percent of those with household incomes under $50k reported experiencing social media envy 3 or more times in the previous month, vs. 21 percent of those with household incomes of 50-100k and 20 percent of those with incomes over $100k).

Published on March 13, 2019

Making new friends is one of those skills, like naming every state capital or hanging on the monkey bars, that seemed intuitive to me in grade school and gradually more difficult as I got older. Without school or extracurriculars, it’s hard to to find new people and awkward to approach them. We’re all alienated, we’re all busy, we all have to figure out how to make time to do laundry — how am I supposed to strike up a relationship with someone who just wants to get a bagel once in a while?

As with everything in 2019, there’s an app for that. Several, in fact. There’s Nextdoor for meeting people who live in your neighborhood, Peanut for finding fellow parents, and Meet My Dog for connecting with fellow dog lovers. Meet My Dog tempted me, but I do not have a dog, and using the app as a scam for hanging out with French bulldogs is frowned upon. Fine. I downloaded two of the more general find-a-friend apps: Bumble BFF and Friender.

Meet My Dog tempted me, but I do not have a dog, and using the app as a scam for hanging out with French bulldogs is frowned upon.

Bumble BFF is an offshoot of the larger dating app Bumble. Friender is sort of “Tinder for friendship.” Both are modeled on the kind of quick-hit dating apps I used at various points when I was single. For both, I filled out a user profile and added in photos that I hoped made me look like the kind of person you might want to be friends with (warm, adventurous, often wearing a caftan).

In Bumble BFF, I answered questions about my go-to karaoke song (“Because the Night” by Patti Smith) and my dream dinner guest (Julia Child). In Friender, I weighed my interests in several categories — CrossFit and clubbing on the lower end; dining, walking, and “arts and crafts” on the higher end. Then I started swiping right or left on the friend options presented. And that’s where my trouble began.

Rejecting or accepting a potential date because of a photograph makes some sense. But a friend? I would never have chosen any of my closest friends based on their photos, or their interests on paper. Many of them are wildly different from me, and that has enriched my life incalculably. No algorithm could have predicted them. The nurse who loves salsa dancing isn’t someone I’d necessarily think I’d connect with — but in person, they might be exactly the kind of friend I need.

Also, it’s hard to be as earnest and vulnerable online as a true deep friendship requires. It’s extra hard when your motivation isn’t a love connection, but a “like” connection. Friend dating, I found, is much like actual dating. I talked to some people for a while and found we just didn’t have that chemistry. Some conversations started excitedly and then petered into nothing.

I was thwarted from meeting up with people for many of the same reasons plans fall through with my non-app friends. Work and other obligations claim most of our time; it’s winter and no one wants to leave the house. The one friend date I successfully planned fell through thanks to a work emergency. But we kept chatting online — she’s in film school, and we have tentative plans to go to a retrospective together in March.

Even if we don’t, I’ve already seen an upside. I’ve regained, slowly, that friend-making muscle memory I used to have when I was younger. I’m once again reflexively curious about new people, and a little in awe of all of the different potential friends you can make at different points in your life. It made me feel less isolated, and more connected to parts of my city that I rarely visit. So I keep swiping.

Published on March 13, 2019

Sara Wachter-Boettcher, an avid runner, tore her ACL last year and couldn’t schedule surgery for several months. In the meantime, she kept running, though not nearly as fast as usual.

But there was no way to tell that to Runkeeper. The popular app for runners had no setting that let her pause her goals toward faster run times without erasing them altogether. “I got a lot of these peppy notifications, like, ‘This is your 79th fastest 5K. Congratulations!’” Wachter-Boettcher says. “What do you mean, ‘Congratulations?’ I’m happy to get out there and do this at all.”

It was a small inconvenience, but a sign of a larger problem as our lives become increasingly intertwined with our phones. We clock hours into sleep trackers; log calories and miles into MyFitnessPal or FitBit; use phones for basic banking and transportation.

But when digital apps are largely designed around simplicity and ease of use, they don’t wind up fitting the needs of everyone. Sometimes, mild annoyance can bleed into insensitivity: Automated forms that don’t allow for non-binary gender identification. Chipper Facebook reminders for a dead loved one’s birthday.

And sometimes, the inconvenience falls hard on groups that wonder if they’re invisible to Silicon Valley altogether. Kelly O’Leary of Berkeley, California, complains that Planned Parenthood’s Spot On app couldn’t be paused when she got pregnant, and now might miscalculate her ovulation cycle. “It’s storing years of useful health data so I’d like to keep using it,” she says.

In a September article in Engadget, writer Swapna Krishna detailed the ways fitness and health apps frustrated her throughout her pregnancy: She was sent dire warnings about her weight gain, and her Apple Watch pestered her about her decreasing activity level. “Tech has failed the bodies of biological women more than it’s served us,” Krishna wrote.

It’s not hard to draw a line between those problems and the larger controversies swirling around the tech industry. There’s the lack of diversity: Despite some high-profile public initiatives, the Silicon Valley workforce is still disproportionately white, male, and young, and those hiring shortcomings can be reflected in tech products.

Critics also say tech companies hew to narrow ways of thinking when their entire development teams come from a similar background, or have the same educational training — often from a handful of the same colleges.

The simplest scenarios become default: a single person catching an Uber; a young, healthy, non-pregnant person logging faster and faster miles.

There’s also the premium Silicon Valley puts on speed and disruption amid tech’s breakneck atmosphere of competition. Wachter-Boettcher, the author of Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech, cites the industry concept of the “minimum viable product:” releasing an app with basic features as quickly as possible, then “not necessarily going back and asking deeper questions about it,” or taking steps to expand upon that basic functionality in later versions.

That’s how the simplest scenarios become default, she says: a single person catching an Uber; a young, healthy, non-pregnant person logging faster and faster miles.

“There are needs that are perceived as ‘normal,’ and other needs that are perceived as ‘abnormal’ or ‘fringe,’” Wachter-Boettcher says. “That makes it harder to serve more people’s needs, because you’re thinking of them as additives.”

For certain types of apps — dating, house-sharing, ride-sharing — a failure to foresee every scenario can put safety at stake, says Juliette Kayyem, a security expert and the CEO of the Boston-based ride-share startup ZemCar.

“All these big companies that view themselves as technology companies, but not as security companies. They’re learning [safety] on the back end,” Kayyem says. “Companies are focused on, ‘Look, we created this amazing platform.’ But it’s not just a platform; we’re bringing people together. And we need to recognize that there’s a vulnerability in that.”

Many Uber and Lyft drivers have come face-to-face with that tension. Under Uber’s terms of use, for instance, minors under 18 aren’t allowed to request rides, or take rides unaccompanied by an adult. But John Hammons, who drives for Uber and Lyft in Florida, says he’s asked to pick teenagers up all the time.

It’s all part of the apps’ design; Hammons has no way of knowing who is requesting a ride beforehand, and if he checks the ID of everyone who looks young, he risks bad reviews and lower ratings — not to mention lost fares.

Younger children put him in another sticky spot. After being pressured a handful of times to transport small children with no proper car seat — which is illegal in most places — he ended up buying his own car seat and booster.  

Many drivers complain about the challenges of transporting minors, says Brett Helling, a former Uber driver who runs the website Gigworker.com. “Uber and Lyft should never put drivers in a position where if they obey the law they’ll be penalized, or if they break the law they’ll be rewarded,” he says.

The industry is slowly catching on. Uber is testing an option that would allow passengers to request car seats in four U.S. cities, and the company recently relaxed its stiff penalties for drivers who cancel rides. Lyft has a “car seat mode” in New York. And startups are swooping in to fill the gaps — from New York’s Kid Car to ZemCar, which pairs families with drivers for regularly scheduled rides for their kids. (Kayyem, of ZemCar, also sees a potential market for elderly people who need regular rides.)

Some drivers find those narrower options attractive.

“Being a woman, driving at night, it’s not always the most comfortable situation. You don’t know who’s getting in your car,” says Natalie Kostich, who used to drive for Uber and now has a few regular ZemCar customers. Her work for ZemCar isn’t as flexible: ZemCar’s on-demand requests tend to all come in during the same peak hours. But it’s consistent, and she meets almost all of her clients face-to-face.

Elsewhere, companies are taking steps to ensure their tech works for wider swaths of people. Pinterest, after realizing its search results for beauty, hair, and makeup were dominated by images of blondes with porcelain skin, introduced a tool in April that allows people to refine their recommended “pins” based on skin tone. A handful of health apps now take pregnancy into account, including Weight Watchers and Nokia Health/Withings’ Pregnancy Tracker.

Wachter-Boettcher says companies could do a better job making those changes on the front end. It’s “very feasible to design features and products that do serve a broader range of people and actually cohesively meet needs,” she says, “as opposed to feeling like you’re going to Frankenstein it together later.”

And companies need to be more honest about the potential negative consequences of their technology, she says.

“It’s not very encouraged in a lot of tech teams, because it’s seen as negative,” she says. “They’re focused on the blue sky and positive outcomes and having vision. That’s great. Talk about that stuff. But you also need to be talking about how could this go wrong.”

Published on February 6, 2019

The whole adventure started as a fluke. Annaliese Koltermann’s partner, Collin, bid on a Westfalia Vanagon on eBay and unexpectedly won it. They renovated the van, sold it, and eventually bought what she calls a “Frankenstein van”: the body of a 1983 Ford E150 Econoline Club Wagon set on the chassis of a 1979 Ford F-350.

Then they left their shared home in Morganton, North Carolina for a summer on the road.

This was their entree to Van Life, a trendy lifestyle movement that typically involves living out of a camper van for months at a time while driving around America. Van Life brands itself as an opportunity to find yourself on the road, and it has taken off among a largely millennial, social-media-friendly set that craves something besides the typical rooted existence.

The thousands of #vanlife images on Instagram have less to do with the day-to-day experience of sleeping in a van and more to do with advertising a lifestyle that seems carefree and idyllic: steaming cups of coffee against startling mountain backdrops; young men and women casually leaning against the hoods of their vans, half naked, looking into the distance; and epic sunsets seen through tinted van windows. But beneath that hashtag-friendly content and those life-affirming themes, the actual life part of Van Life isn’t always quite so pretty.

While Van Life is portrayed as a mostly-millennial journey on Instagram, it’s not just millennials who dream of living on the road. Harley Sitner, the owner of a thriving Seattle van repair shop, serves clients who span generations, including retired couples who are finally free to hit the open road and tech industry exiles who want to get out of the rat race.

Sitner himself is a 51-year-old who never intended to become a mechanic; he started his own career in tech, eventually working his way up to a Senior Manager position at Microsoft. He bought his own Westfalia Vanagon while working for the tech giant and took the van for frequent fixes at Peace Vans, his favorite van repair shop in Seattle. Then, six years ago, he heard the shop might close its doors.

Sitner had left Microsoft at that point and wanted to try his hand at something new. “If I buy this place, at least I’ll have somewhere to fix my van,” he remembers telling his wife.

Though he knew little about the vintage van repair market, Sitner says his business background translated well to his new project. Peace Vans is unassuming in appearance — sandwiched between warehouses and junkyards on a side street in the up-and-coming neighborhood of SoDo — but it has become something of an empire. Sitner says the business is 10 times larger today than it was when he bought it, making it one of the largest retro camper van repair shops in the United States and certainly the largest in the Pacific Northwest.

Today, the Peace Vans team repairs vans from all corners of America; the vans are usually so old that new parts are hard to come by anywhere else. The shop has a wait list of over a month for simple repairs. Sitner also rents retro vans, decked out with gear and maps of possible Pacific Northwest adventures, to curious summer tourists.

I visited Peace Vans one day last fall and found hundreds of camper vans, mostly Vanagons, lined up three-deep in a parking lot behind the office, glittering like seals in the afternoon sun, waiting for makeovers. The vans were tall, short, round, square, carpeted, wood-paneled, glittery, grungy, souped up and sometimes altogether decked out. Most of them boasted mini fridges, several burners for cooking quick meals, fold-down beds, and pop tops.

Sitner stood beside the lot, seeming to fully embody Van Life; the #VanLife hashtag was even emblazoned across his T-shirt. His hair was covered by a beanie and he wore dirty blue jeans with hiking boots. He’d just returned from Burning Man, where he slept in his own rust red Vanagon for a week.

“This is late stage capitalism, where the bifurcation of classes is so extreme that the top and the bottom meet again at a certain experience.”

As I followed him around his busy workshop, it became evident that for him, this work is about more than just repairs. Sitner also serves as a Van Life guru — and at times, a spiritual counselor — for the wanderers who roll in. One older couple, sitting in the Peace Vans front office, peppered him with questions about their new Mercedes van. Could they get a trailer for their e-bikes? Could they install a power system that would support her CPAP ventilator? Yes and yes, he said. Happy to accommodate.

Later, Sitner got teary as he told me about the families who have repaired relationships in his vans, and the customers who have rediscovered their love for the outdoors. Sometimes he misses the tech world, he said, but those stories make his current work worthwhile.

Still, Sitner recognizes the discrepancies between the social-media-facing, idyllic version of Van Life and the reality of living in a van. Eventually, Koltermann came to learn about this gap, too. At 27, she seemed supremely eligible for an itinerant life. She works as a yoga teacher, life coach, and energy healer, and created an online school that teaches people how to apply these practices to their lives. So she was mostly able to keep her business chugging along while they drove across America — though she and Collin also saved money before their trip, knowing they wouldn’t be able to work as much on the road.

Koltermann says she joined the Van Life movement hoping to find the self discovery and connection often associated with a wandering lifestyle. But not long into her trip, she also discovered some unexpected hassles. As they traveled from North Carolina to Oregon, parking for days at a time at campsites and RV parks, Koltermann grew tired of the heat. Most cities were so sweltering during the summer months that she couldn’t leave her two dogs in the van alone, for even short amounts of time. The van guzzled gas. In Telluride, Colorado, it broke down multiple times due to the high elevation — and she and Collin ran out of money more quickly than expected because of expensive repairs.

This is a common problem for Van Lifers, Sitner says. Older vans cost at least $20,000 up front if you want something that’s in good shape, he says. A solid renovation can run you anywhere from $20,000 to $80,000. Repairs will be constant and expensive, too, especially if you buy an older van. Because Koltermann’s van was a hybrid model, finding replacement parts was that much harder.

Koltermann said she also struggled to cook meals, as taking all of the kitchen supplies out of the top of the van and then putting them back became a multi-hour chore. Living without plumbing, she discovered, was more tolerable on a short camping trip than it was for weeks on end. She pooped in dog bags on a regular basis.

“Personal hygiene was a real challenge,” Koltermann said. “You have to take your first steps of the day in public and you feel totally exposed when you get up and need to go to the bathroom.”

On top of it all was the guilt. Koltermann said she sometimes struggled with the ethics of living out of a van by choice, especially when they were parked beside people who were living out of their cars and vans by necessity.

This issue literally surrounds Sitner’s repair shop: Seattle’s homeless population is growing, and many people who have been pushed out of the high-priced housing market are now living in RVs and vans along the side streets, often packing in bumper to bumper at dusk. These people have nowhere to go, and can rarely afford the van repairs or luxuries that their soul-searching neighbors can. They also don’t get to leave the adventure when the experience wears on them.

“This is late-stage capitalism,” Sitner says, “where the bifurcation of classes is so extreme that the top and the bottom meet again at a certain experience. Capital-V Van Life is a choice. Lowercase-v van life isn’t.”

Once Koltermann and her partner hit Portland, Oregon, they cut their trip short, opting to stay there in the comfort of her uncle’s home for a month. Eventually, they sold the Franken-van and bought a Toyota Tacoma, which they drove back to North Carolina during the fall months. Now they live in Santa Fe.

Is she glad she spent those months on the road? Despite all the struggles, Koltermann’s answer is yes. “I think Van Life is about millennials testing their boundaries or lack thereof. It helped me see what I do and don’t like,” she says.

Sitner understands; he compares Van Life to a drug. “On a good day, there’s nothing better,” he says. “It’s addictive. But [Van Life] looks better [in photos] than it is. On a bad day, it’s not #VanLife. It’s just #badlife.”

Still, folks like Sitner and Koltermann believe the experience has staying power, especially for millennials. As the “gig economy” grows and more young Americans pick up remote jobs and contract work, by choice or out of necessity, a wandering lifestyle will become more feasible.

And the complexity of Van Life may be part of its charm, delivering on difficulty — which is arguably necessary for “finding yourself” — and occasionally, when the sun comes out and your van is parked in just the right place, a moment so perfect it belongs on Instagram.

Published on January 30, 2019

My name is Jenni, and I’m obsessed with people on social media whom I’ve never actually met.

I can tell you every detail about @thebalancedblonde’s search for wellness, and I know what @leefromamerica ate for dinner at the airport on her way to Portland. When I’m in the car and pull up to a stop light, I scroll through workout tips from @thebalancedberry and photos of @rachaelsgoodeats’ insta-beautiful breakfast toasts. I feel like I know more about these people’s daily lives than the lives of many of my closest friends. And of course, I know what they’re selling, too.

Instagram started as a place to share personal photos, touched up with flattering filters. But as happens with the internet, it soon became a sales and marketing platform, too. Now, it’s the place where an exalted subset of the online population, a group known as “Instagram influencers,” use their personal accounts to help brands sell excursions, food, clothing, and much more.

For their curated visions of perfectly-lit meals and dream vacations, these influencers stand to command a monumental amount of attention. As of June 2018, Instagram, owned by Facebook, reported 1 billion users worldwide, 500 million of whom use the platform daily. According to Hootsuite, most active users spend at least 30 minutes per day scrolling through photos. Corporate marketing departments have embraced this captive audience wholeheartedly: Statista reports that the U.S. spent $121 billion on influencer marketing in 2015.

Leasing your personal images as a billboard for corporate use always seemed to me partially exploitative and partially brilliant. When I was laid off from my journalism job last March, I became extra-fascinated by the line of work. The influencers I follow have hundreds of thousands of doting followers who compliment their outfits, their food, and their hairstyles. The most successful ones are able to quit their day jobs and make a living by taking selfies in stunning locales.

After I was laid off, I realized that I had some free time, along with a food blog with a fair number of followers. I’m handy with photography and I can write a fast caption. I could make money by posting a picture of myself with a dairy-free ice cream treat in my hand, right? Maybe it was just a matter of learning new hashtags and buying a fancy digital camera?

I started asking around.

Portia Smith and I had planned for a 10:30 am phone call and she was punctual, if a bit distracted. She explained that there might be some noises in the background: She had her daughter with her and was taking the call from her car.

Smith runs a popular travel brand called @obsessedbyportia. Her bio reads: “Mom of 2 ???? Luxury Travel ???? @MatadorNetwork “Seattle Blogger to Follow”. 23 countries ✈️. Next stop ???????? London/Rome/Amalfi.” Every image on Smith’s feed contains shades of brown, teal, and watermelon red. Her daughters wear matching red outfits. Her attractive husband smiles broadly in a red hat. There’s a photo of her kids with a red and green watermelon floatie at the beach and a photo of Smith herself, wearing a red life vest during a trip to the San Juan Islands, smiling as her hair whips in the wind. Who wouldn’t want to live that life?

The Smith I talked to was more human than her feed would suggest. Six hours earlier, at 4:30 a.m., she had been running five miles through her neighborhood. (She was training for a half marathon.) Then she came home to shower before waking up her daughters, ages 5 and 7, and her husband. She made breakfast, packed lunches, and dropped her older daughter off at school before heading to a coffee shop to work and talk to me.

A 40,000-follower count is considered the entryway to making some money; hitting 100,000 means you’ve unequivocally “made it.”

In 2014, Smith was a stay-at-home mom looking for a creative outlet. She wanted to lose her baby weight so she figured she’d write about that fitness journey on a blog. At first, she didn’t tell anybody about her new pursuit. But then her blog started to gather more and more followers, which she attributes partly to good timing — blogging was hot at the time — and partly to an authentic-sounding voice that appealed to an audience of like-minded mothers.

Eventually, after observing other bloggers, Smith realized that she could make a business out of her online presence if she could get brands interested. She moved onto Instagram and Facebook, talking about her life as a mom and her fitness journey. Then she thought: What if I moved into fashion?

“I walked into my first fashion blogger event and I was like, ‘Why am I here?’ I’m 36 and everyone was super young. But I got used to that,” she says. In the beginning, brands would offer Smith free products; beverages and health bars, mostly. They wanted her to post photos of their products but it wasn’t required and no money changed hands.

Sometimes, in those early days, Smith would also reach out to brands with varying success. Then, as her follower count grew, brands began to offer her paid incentives: $25 for a photo featuring their products, then $50, then $200. At the time of this writing, Smith’s follower count on Instagram was 61,500. Now, brands mostly reach out to her asking her to feature their products and services, not the other way around.

According to Smith and nearly a dozen other influencers I spoke with, your ability to command respect from the corporate world depends on whether you’ve crossed certain follower thresholds. A 40,000-follower count is considered the entryway to making some money; hitting 100,000 means you’ve unequivocally “made it.” In some industries, such as fashion, larger brands will only consider collaborations after you surpass 200,000 followers.

Recently, Smith pivoted her account again, this time to focus on family travel. Hotels, tour agencies, and even national tourism boards sponsor her family’s vacations with a contractual arrangement that says she needs to share photos of everything she does with her followers. Each brand asks for different things in exchange for a free stay: Photos of certain hotel features, captions with explicit hashtags, Facebook posts with links to the hotels where she stays, a blog post or maybe a Twitter mention. Sometimes, they pay Smith directly for her content — which they use on their own websites — in addition to the free stay or excursion.

She schedules her Instagram posts to go live between 12 and 3 p.m. She uses the same DSLR presets every time. Every photo uses the same filter.

Each influencer I spoke with had a different view about how to refer to brand-sponsored content. Many told me that their followers have come to expect that all Instagram content is sponsored so they don’t even mention it when they’re sharing photos with products or services in them. Others use #ad in their captions to signify sponsored content. A few explicitly explain their partnerships to their followers.

Emelina Spinelli, a social media consultant whose @ecspinelli account (“Instagram Consultant, Coffee Boss + Beverly Hills Life, New Yorker in LA”) has more than 51,000 followers, suggests erring on the side of honesty. People won’t be upset about sponsored posts, she says, but they will be upset about inauthenticity. Instagram recently launched a feature that allows people to tag sponsored brands in their posts, as they would a location. None of the influencers I spoke with use this feature; they say it limits their reach.

At this point, Smith makes a full-time living from @obsessedbyportia, which is actually a rarity among influencers. But there’s a reason for her success: She follows the playbook pretty damn perfectly. She schedules her Instagram posts to go live between 12 and 3 p.m., when statistics show that her mom-heavy audience is most active. The distinct color palette in her feed makes things look consistent, well planned, and intentional. Whether a photographer she hires is taking photos of her or she’s taking them on her own, she uses the same DSLR presets every time. Every photo she posts uses the same filter.

Although her feed might give you the impression that she’s trailed by cameras every minute of every day, most of Smith’s shoots with a professional photographer are planned in advance and last for part of just one day per month. She “batches photos” during photo shoots, changing outfits, then using the photos in multipronged postings to her blog, Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram over the next few months.

Many of the influencers I spoke to talked about the planning that goes into image-making, and the disconnect between the gauzy images and an often-dull reality. “My life isn’t that interesting! I sit at a desk,” says Jenn Haskins of @hellorigby, a Seattle-based fashion account with 25,000 followers (“A modern girl & her ???? living in a colorful world. Fashion????, beauty????, home???? & travel✈️!”).

Almost all of Rigby’s fashion content is sponsored by brands and nearly every photo in her feed features Jenn looking into the distance, giggling, and holding a sponsored item, while wearing bright colors or floral prints. She recently reduced her hours at her tech job to spend her time investing in her Instagram account, but she talks about her growing side gig with a hint of resignation: “It’s a lot more work than people think.”

Being an influencer is all-encompassing, she and other influencers say. You need to respond to your followers’ comments every day, which means you’re rarely able to put down your phone. You have to be your own promoter, marketer, head of sales, head of finance, visual director, and content creator. If you want to keep your follower count stable and, in turn, keep making money, you’ll need to be tied to a version of yourself — the traveling mom, the finance maven, the coffee connoisseur, the self-love guru — for years. And of course, your professional life will bleed into your personal life: How do you really vacation when your vacations are work?

You’ll also spend your time tied to a platform that may or may not live past the next 10 years. And brands are becoming increasingly cynical about the influencer market. An Atlantic story last summer noted that hotels have become overwhelmed with free-stay requests from influencers, and have become more likely to scrutinize and push back.

Plus, Spinelli notes, as the number of people on Instagram increases, the threshold for entry will get higher. “It’s just going to get harder from here,” she says.

There’s another downside to this influencer business, and Spinelli is brutally honest about that, too: Working on Instagram can take a toll on your mental health. Public health studies have shown that the platform can cause depression, lack of sleep, loneliness, poor body image, increased bullying, and heightened anxiety. The most honest influencers acknowledge how unhealthy social media can be for their own health, yet they depend on people behaving unhealthily in order to make a living.

“There’s no way to be on Instagram for more than five minutes and not feel like you suck as a person,” Spinelli says. “Seriously, the app is designed to make you compare yourself to other people. I do my best not to go on the app anymore and if I do, I set a timer so I get out fast.”

Spinelli says she coaches her clients to set strong boundaries around Instagram. “A lot of them are on their phones 24/7 and it’s not financially profitable,” she says. Instead of being constantly available, Spinelli even recommends scheduling out content for months or weeks in advance and ignoring the app itself most of the time.

Working in this industry seems to require a comfort with these troubling dualities: presenting a reality on your feed that isn’t actually your reality; enticing people to spend time on a platform that’s bad for their health; and enthusiastically representing brands that you may or may not truly support. I met influencers who seemed to genuinely care about their followers, who rarely took sponsored deals unless they had used (and liked) the products in question. I also met people who were willing to take any brand deal, at any time, no matter what it was.

Influencers are a varied, complex bunch, driven by many different motivations. In short, they’re like people working in any industry. And that’s the main thing I realized, after talking with many influencers, reading through pages and pages of stats about internet usage and mental health, and scrolling past hundreds of pictures of cute children, flowy patterned dresses, and sunset landscapes: This job is just a job. The five perfectly sculpted photos you see every week on your favorite influencer’s feed belie a 40-hour work week filled with sales emails, marketing conversations, constant community engagement, and tedious photo editing. For the most part, being a successful influencer comes down to hard work, persistence, and a preternatural focus.

Thus, being an influencer is not, I realized, a job I’d necessarily want for myself. And in this newly-invented field, where the ground rules change by the month, even the most successful practitioners have their doubts. When I asked bloggers about their advice for people who want to break into the industry, each gave me a variation of the same answer: Are you sure?

Published on October 15, 2018