Instagram Model Essena O’Neill Shuts Down Her “Perfect” Online Life, Starts “Game Changing” Website

Instagram celebrities seem to exist within their weird bubble, where they have simultaneously attracted hundreds of thousands (and sometimes millions) of followers, yet the majority will have still never heard of them. It certainly appears to be a lucrative career path, with those who gain a following on the social image sharing site able to land product placement deals worth thousands of dollars, earning more than some people do in an entire month just by posting one image of them wearing a pair of TopShop jeans, or sipping on a weight loss shake. 

Essena O’Neill decided to uncover the lives of those behind the idealistic Instagram photos earlier this week, with the self-proclaimed Instagram model shedding some light on the hard work that actually goes into making your life look “perfect” in order to attract the kind of brand deals and online notoriety that leads to these young, attractive individuals forging a career out of little more than a few selfies and snapshots of them wearing a bikini.

With over 600,000 followers, the 19-year-old Australian student decided to leave Instagram after admitting that she had become “obsessed” with people liking her, choosing to change the captions of her Instagram posts in order to represent the grim reality of what could easily have been misconstrued as a young woman enjoying her seemingly care-free life. After branding our current social media-focused world the “brainwashed generation,” she uploaded a YouTube video (which has since been deleted) to announce that she would be removing all of her social media accounts, but not before revealing what she really thought of the life that had garnered her so much attention on the Internet.

Check out the Instagram images along with Essena’s edited captions in the gallery below:

However, Essena’s decision to delete her social media presence was not without purpose, as she followed it up by debuting her new website Let’s Be Game Changers. While Essena has come under criticism for what is perceived as a thinly veiled marketing move rather than a real push away from social media (her claim that she’s going “off the grid” despite now posting videos on DailyMotion and starting up her own website indicate a lack of understanding in regards to what going off the grid actually means), let’s consider this for a second:

She is 19 years old.

Regardless of whether or not this is all a big self-promotional ploy, let us not forget that she is 

19 years old.

Most teenagers would give their left leg to be able to have 600,000 followers on Instagram at that age, so Essena shutting down the accounts that made her so much money in order to create a website devoted to openly discussing the bleak ins-and-outs of social media, and deconstructing the “illusion” of the perfect lives lived by those attached to these aspirational Instagram accounts, is commendable and in its own way quite brave.

Despite Essena now coming under criticism from both her former followers, fans, friends and individuals who had never even heard of her prior to this debacle, perhaps head-hunting a 19-year-old who is trying to break free of the ever-judgmental gaze of social media in order to make some sort of impact within her own, Internet-obsessed world isn’t the most reasonable course of action here.

Good luck, Essena.