New Feelings: Selfish Intimacy

Others I posted to my Instagram, which is slapdash and homely, with about as many followers as it deserves — I use the app like I once used Facebook, as a way of being ambiently with people I like, or to set up a dopamine drip while I’m doing something I’d rather not. My friends, flung out over the continent, were posting their own holiday or non-holiday pictures, and as much as I love my parents I felt homesick, as one does, for my independence. Posting pictures of friends means using their image, in some way, to augment your own, inviting the sort of self-presentational calculus from which friendships are, ideally, an oasis.

Source: reallifemag.com