Instagram influencers. We love to hate them because they make us feel like we’re not living up to some photogenic standard of perfection. There’s no Instagram influencer more loathsome than the traveler type, but now that coronavirus has canceled, closed, or otherwise destroyed every diversion on the planet, us regular folk who never leave home can finally have our day in the (digitally enhanced and perfectly filtered) sun.
Just look at Instagram influencer Jessica Jones (not her real name), who decided to flout all the warnings about traveling during the coronavirus outbreak. On a recent trip to Italy, she posed in front of empty café tables in the abandoned St. Mark’s Square. She took a pic of the closed Colosseum in Rome, not realizing the seemingly sleeping homeless man she cropped out may have very well been COVID-19’s latest victim. At The Piazza Duomo, she was disappointed to find that the landmark had nothing to do with pizza and noticed that the only people milling about all had surgical masks on. Instead of enviable snaps, her feed looked like the saddest, loneliest vacation ever – and the lack of likes she amassed was as startling at the current COVID-19 infection stats.
If one good thing comes out of this pandemic, maybe it’ll be that Instagram influencers will realize that traveling doesn’t in and of itself make them more interesting (any more than photographing and eating avocado toast does), and they’ll actually have to develop a personality instead.
Cover Photo: Igor Ustynskyy (Getty Images)
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