BeReal is Weird and Doesn't Solve Your Real Problem
The app that claims to make you more authentic (and probably doesn't)
Back when everyone used Snapchat, I saw so many pictures of walls.
“Snapstreaks” were introduced in 2016. Snapchat keeps track of how many consecutive days you and your friend send Snaps to each other, and displays the number of days next to your friend’s name with a fire emoji. You keep sending pictures to keep the streak going, to make the little number go up.
In practice, this meant most of us sent pictures of our dorm walls at 8am with "gm" scribbled across the picture.
Keeping your streaks alive was draining. I once asked some friends what the point was. One friend said, "It’s a way to keep in touch. It helps you see what's going on in your friends' lives."
But you didn't get updated on people's lives. You got pictures of walls, pictures of sidewalks, pictures of lecture halls, and the occasional video of something interesting happening. Snapchat promised a method to keep in touch with friends, but it instead gave a method to tiredly spam your contact list with meaningless pictures, every single day.
Enter BeReal
BeReal is a social media app launched in 2020 that pushes its users to be authentic. To “Be Real.”
Once a day, at a random time, BeReal sends a notification telling you to take a picture. You then have 2 minutes to take a picture of whatever you’re doing. For extra authenticity, BeReal takes photos from both your phone’s front and back cameras. If you’re late, everyone will see that your picture was late. And every day, you can’t see anyone else’s posts until you post your own.
You cannot glamorize your life on BeReal. You post, no matter how boring or uninteresting the moment is.
BeReal takes a radical approach to social media. Most apps give you massive control over when and how you post. BeReal, by contrast, is restrictive. No control over when you post, how often you post, or what your post looks like. It’s not an “anti-social media” project; this is still an app run by a corporation that raised $30 million in venture funding in 2021. But it seems fair to call it the “anti-Instagram1.”
It’s been touted as "Gen Z's new favorite app." In my authority as a Gen-Z person, I tried the app for a while, and I find it kind of soul-crushing.
Is BeReal Worth It?
(No, lol)
BeReal struck a chord because it talks about a problem we Gen-Z folk know too well: social media puts pressure on us to present our best selves. It markets itself as a social media app that understands the problems of Instagram or Facebook. But as much as it claims otherwise, BeReal still contains many of social media’s flaws.
Social media is a time suck. Social media is a pervasive, obnoxious distraction. And what is BeReal’s premise? That every day, BeReal will ask you to drop everything, to post on their social media app. And no, you can’t put it off! You have to post on BeReal right fucking now, because BeReal commands you to. You have 2 minutes.
It’s not a way to be authentic, it’s a leech on your attention.
We were convinced Snapstreaks were a way to stay in touch with friends. But more often, it just became another stressor in people’s lives, another ball to juggle. If someone went on vacation, and had no cell service, they would give their Snapchat login info to a friend, who would then “manage their streaks,” sending pictures of walls in their absence. This was pretty common (I personally did this for friends a couple times). What was all this hassle for? To make a number go up next to a fire emoji. We were so anxious over losing our streaks we instead lost ourselves.
BeReal wants you to believe it will make you authentic and less anxious about what you post. But the app is just another ball to juggle. It’s another time vampire, another virtual job.
What We Want: Connection and Community
I was not born with some innate desire for Instagram. But I was born with a desire for meaningful connection. Every social media app promises us connection.
So let me ask: does BeReal help us foster meaningful connections? Does it help us be authentic with our friends and loved ones? Is it more authentic than any of the following:
Calling your friend on the phone and putting down any distractions?
Making plans to (safely) meet with them in person?
Mailing them a handwritten card?
Being honest when they ask how your day’s been?
Giving them a genuine compliment?
Showing you’re grateful for them and that you’d miss them if they were gone?
Asking thoughtful questions about your friend’s life?
Before we download a social media app of any kind, we must remember the promises these apps make to us. We must ask if those promises are met. And we must remember what we even want from these apps.
The Amish are exceptional at remembering what they want from technology. We often picture the Amish as quaint people who live without phones or electricity or cars because they’re stuck in the past. But as Cal Newport notes in Digital Minimalism, this is not true. Personal phones are banned, but most Amish villages have a community phone booth. You can’t own a car, but it’s common to ride in a car driven by someone else. You won’t find an outlet to plug in a TV, but you will find solar panels powering farm equipment.
The Amish start with their core values, then work backwards and ask which technologies best support those values. They inspect technologies and ask, “Will this be more helpful or harmful?” Owning a car is banned because a townsperson with a car would use it to go sightseeing in other towns, instead of visiting the sick or patronizing local shops, and a tight-knit community is deeply important to the Amish.
Jenny Odell, in her fantastic book How to Do Nothing, remarks that if we want our attention back from apps, we must refuse the notion “that the present time and place, and the people who are here with us, are somehow not enough.” Facebook and Instagram, Odell states, “act like dams that capitalize on our natural interest in others and an ageless need for community, hijacking and frustrating our most innate desires, and profiting from them.”
Don’t Let Your Moments Slip Away
I have a confession. I recently removed 60% of my Instagram followers (about 300 people). Why do I use Instagram in the first place? Mainly because my friends send me cool memes. But also, I use it as a way to share bits of my personal life. Many of my followers were people I had met exactly one time, or people I did not feel close to, or people who I knew from some distant corner of my life. There was nothing I felt comfortable sharing with this specific group of 553 people.
When you’re trying to please that many people, you post bland, sterile content. Celebrations. Vacations. Awards. The kind of thing everyone can cheer for.2
The exact kind of content BeReal pushes you not to post.
My solution was not to download BeReal. My solution was to strictly let go of my Instagram followers, until it became a smaller crowd of people I’m much more comfortable around.3
BeReal wants to spread authenticity. But I will be real with you. There are better ways to spend our time. “But it only takes a few seconds to post a BeReal!” one might say. Do not let an app steal moments from you. Those seconds add up. The Roman philosopher Seneca understood this in 49 A.D., thousands of years before distractions like Facebook, YouTube, or season 1 of Love Island existed. As Seneca wrote in his essay “On the Shortness of Life:”
“Look back in memory and consider... how many have robbed you of life when you were not aware of what you were losing, how much was taken up in useless sorrow, in foolish joy, in greedy desire, in the allurements of society, how little of yourself was left to you.”
The authentic life is one where we’re not on the leash of an app. Even an app that begs it’ll make our lives more authentic.
BeReal’s app store description includes this line: “BeReal won't make you famous. If you want to become an influencer you can stay on TikTok and Instagram.”
We also do this because through life we have many selves—a work self, a family self, a gym self, a pottery club self—and a social media app forces you to smush all those selves together into one place. The way you talk to your family is not the same way you’d talk to the people from your pottery club (you say some really out of pocket things at pottery club), so we often post inoffensive things that all parts of our lives can tolerate.
Scholars call this “context collapse,” and anthropologist Sophia Goodman describes it as “trying to comfortably chat with your mother, bar buddy, work colleague, and ex-boyfriend at the same time.”
Yes, I understand 200-ish people is still a lot, and I’ll probably cut down on followers even more in the future. But it’s a huge improvement.