Under the Influence- How to Fake Your Way Into Getting Rich on Instagram

by Trey Ratcliff

  How to Be a Valuable Human

  Let’s break down a common thought pattern that the ego creates and illustrate why it is ridiculous. We’ll continue to use Instagram as an example, but you can plug in any social network. And we’ll use “You” as the actor in this hypothetical situation, which may be disconcerting if it’s real and not hypothetical in your case.

  You post a photo on Instagram. It could be anything. It’s a typical photo for you. A cat. Ice cream. A selfie. A waterfall. An inspirational quote. Whatever, it doesn’t matter. Okay, posted.

  You wait 30 seconds or, if you are exceptionally patient, you wait a few minutes.

  You refresh that post to see how many likes or comments you have received so far. What? You only got a few? Less than usual? Oh, heavens. Maybe the photo you posted is terrible! This is clearly below your standards. You’re losing your audience with this one photo! Your friends think you’re dumb.

  The internal anxiety builds. You are automatically linking the success of that one photo to your entire self-worth in that moment. If people didn’t find your photo valuable, then it only stands to reason that they don’t find YOU valuable. Thus, over time, photo after photo, you slowly begin to devalue yourself as a human, simply because the world is not valuing your photos with their clicks and taps.

  Of course, when it’s described this way, this is a completely ridiculous narrative, but you can see the type of poisonous narrative your ego creates for you.

  Let me go around your silly ego for a moment and tell you something you already know: You are a valuable human being. You know this already. The very nature of being born makes you a valuable member of the human race. You’re probably even more valuable than you think, especially if you love and care about a lot of people in your life.

  So isn’t it interesting, when you look at it like this, how your ego will sneak in there and start to fill you with self-doubt over something as utterly inconsequential as a series of digital bits you upload to a social network? Watch out for that.

  And as you think about this, start applying this concept to other social media accounts that you see. Watch how people will upload anything so that they can rank highly on the constructed scoreboard and their ego can continue its silly little game.

  But don’t worry, you can check out of that game at any time. We’ll talk about how in just a minute.

  Figure out What Your Goal Actually Is

  So many people are lost nowadays, adrift in a world where they let the media dictate what is important only for those values to be reinforced by their friends on social media parroting works of fiction. People are striving for the ultimate goal of True Happiness which is a lie sold by the media and popular culture.

  Imagine those words glowing in fairy lights. But is it the right thing to be looking for?

  I think people focus too much on happiness because it seems like an obvious thing to chase, but what I believe people really want is meaningful events to happen as often as possible. When meaningful events occur in your life happiness comes over you like a soft shadow in the afternoon.

  If you are not having meaningful events when you are poor and have no followers, then you certainly won’t have any better chance of being happier once you do have riches and fame. We all know many rich and famous people who are quite miserable.

  Nobel Prize winning economist Daniel Kahneman recently posited that humans aren’t actually chasing happiness after all—we’re looking for satisfaction—which is based on having had meaningful experiences over time. In a podcast, he said, “Altogether, I don’t think that people maximize happiness in that sense … this doesn’t seem to be what people want to do. They actually want to maximize their satisfaction with themselves and with their lives. And that leads in completely different directions than the maximization of happiness.”83

  Kahneman posits that satisfaction is based mostly on comparisons. “Life satisfaction is connected to a large degree to social yardsticks–achieving goals, meeting expectations.”

  An article discussing Kahneman’s theory goes on to explain how this dynamic actually makes us very unhappy:

  The key here is memory. Satisfaction is retrospective. Happiness occurs in real time. In Kahneman’s work, he found that people tell themselves a story about their lives, which may or may not add up to a pleasing tale.

  This theory helps to explain our current social media-driven culture. To some extent, we care less about enjoying ourselves than presenting the appearance of an enviable existence. We’re preoccupied with quantifying friends and followers rather than spending psychtime with people we like. And ultimately, this makes us miserable.84

  Instagram is full of people with a lot of followers, likes, and comments, who have seemingly idyllic lives. At the basic Pavlovian level, these metrics become associated with happiness. But it’s all a very silly snake oil that you’re buying, not only from the salesman-like-Influencers, but from the platform—Instagram. The truth is that you are already a complete and fully realized awesome human. You certainly don’t need Instagram or their framework to confirm your worth as a human being.

  Derek Sivers takes this minimalist view. In an email to me, he said, “Life can be improved by adding, or by subtracting. The world pushes you to add, because that benefits them. But the secret is to focus on subtracting.”

  Dabble in Mindfulness

  Learning to use your mind like a quiet ninja is absolutely, positively, without a doubt, the number one most important skill in the world. And it is a skill, like swimming or sewing, that gets easier the more you practice it.

  Meditation is one way you can do this. Meditation is an exercise in quieting your mind and focusing your thoughts. It allows you to reflect on what’s important to you. It also has the added benefit of helping to put some of the less important things in life into perspective.

  If you don’t have a daily practice of meditation yet, there are three apps I recommend that you can use to get started right away. The greatest thing about these apps is you don’t have to do anything except carve out a few minutes a day to use them. You don’t have to sit in a special position. All it requires is a little shift in attitude that feels like, “Yeah, my mind is kinda strange. I’m curious as to what’s goin’ on in there and why.” You’ll find your mind to be quite the playground when you begin to observe it.

  The first app I’ll recommend is Headspace. Headspace has a free ten-day course for beginners with a series of guided meditations. Start by committing just 10-20 minutes a day to it. Pop in your headphones and just listen to the voice. The voice will tell you what to do. It won’t tell you what not to do, so don’t worry about that. In fact, sometimes you won’t be doing anything at all. Meditation is great because it has a very forgiving premise.

  The second app is the Sam Harris meditation app called The Waking Up Course. There is a free version with a few lessons you can try. I think Sam is great too.

  The third one I’ll recommend is Oak, which was built by Kevin Rose (@kevinrose). It’s a free app and he is adding new stuff to it continuously. In that app, by the way, I have contributed one of my videos I made that uses the wise words of Alan Watts entitled, “Life From Above and Beyond.”

  Anyway, there’s a cumulative effect to meditation, so try it for a couple of weeks. Time spent investing in your own mind is probably the wisest decision anyone can make. Even better, meditation can really help you see all social media and your objective position within the fictional maelstrom, from a 10,000-foot view, if you want to.

  Set Some Social Media Rules of Engagement

  One of my favorite books is The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, by Mark Manson. I read it and said aloud, “This is like a fucking autobiography.” If you haven’t read it yet, it’s not at all a manual on how to be indifferent to everything, as the title might suggest. It’s about developing the self-awareness not to be concerned about what others may think of you and doing what you feel is right, according to
your own set of values.85 Once you cultivate this attitude, your life gets exponentially easier, and you’ll also be able to detect what has substance.

  I talked to Josh Whiton, eco-entrepreneur, about his approach to social media, which is comparatively hands-off. He resisted social media for a while, but now uses it for positivity and spreading the word on his MakeSoil.org project. “I mostly use it as a broadcast channel whenever I get an idea that I believe is helpful or healing for people,” he told me. “Then I do my best to not stick around monitoring the likes and replies and sign off.”

  That said, this subtle art doesn’t just happen overnight. So in the meantime, I’ll share a few practical tips that I use to stay sane on social media. I hope you’ll find them helpful too.

  My No-Selfie Policy

  I do have this policy—which I might only break once a year or so—I don’t take selfies. To begin with, I don’t find myself to be a real stunner, so it’s actually a gift in not forcing other people to look at me all the time.

  But that’s not the real reason.

  The real reason is I have so much quietness and serenity in my mind when I am in a possible “good selfie” location. For example, I was recently on a vacation, sitting in a nice pool and watching the sunset, drinking a glass of wine. It was awesome. I didn’t want to spend one second wondering if I should take a photo of this experience. I didn’t wonder what angle the light was coming. I didn’t think about how to pose myself for the perfect selfie. If I wanted to do that, I would have spent 20-30 minutes on crazy-selfie time, not to mention all the editing, uploading, commenting, liking, and, well, you know. Meanwhile, I was just there in the moment, at peace, and it was wonderful. I don’t need to prove to anyone that I look super cool and that I have a good life.

  I was out on a boat in the Caribbean a while back with a bunch of Influencers. Oh my lordy, you should have seen it. There were about ten or eleven of us all together. For at least two of the three hours we were out there, all these Influencers did was take photos of one another. It was funny because they all framed their shots in such a way it looked like they were alone on the yacht, experiencing a fabulous moment of pensive solitude. You’ve probably seen this type of photo. But, actually, in the background, everyone was running around in a chaotic way, trying to get similar shots. It was the strangest thing. None of them were actually in the moment, appreciating the experience.

  My No Foodstagram Policy

  Have you ever seen Foodie Influencers eat together? It’s the most comical thing ever. The second the food arrives at their table, they are all standing up, running around with their phones, getting different angles, etc. It can honestly be 10 minutes of this before anyone takes a bite. They don’t even say anything to each other during these 10 minutes because they are concentrating on getting their shots. It’s the most unnatural thing in the world. It’s also quite unnatural in that they are all secretly wanting better photos than everyone else at the table. Meanwhile, their food is getting cold.

  Instagrammers having lunch together.

  I prefer to converse with my tablemates. I find that to be more meaningful than intensely documenting the meal. Now look, if you’re gonna take a quick photo of your food and share it online occasionally, that’s fine. It’s not annoying … the idea is to do it casually, so you control the flow instead of it controlling you.

  My No-Clichés And Response-Generating Gimmicks Policy

  Instead of being genuine and in the moment, lots of people resort to trite tactics to feed their insatiable need for more engagement. I even notice my ego trying to freak me out a little bit on this topic. Luckily, the ego no longer has a foothold after years of study on consciousness, presence, the mind, Zen, and this sort of thing, but sometimes I still notice it trying to sneak into my internal dialogue. But hey, I’m no Buddha. I’m a work in progress.

  Many Instagrammers are spending too much time overthinking, “What can I do to get more comments about my photos?” Feeling the pressure to perform, their ego ends up using one of the following “Instagram Response-Generating Gimmicks.”

  You have probably seen one or more of the below methods employed. They’re popular because people engage with them, but they also lack originality. So I try to avoid them and do my own thing.

  Image-based tropes I avoid:

  Hold something cute—like a hamster—in my hand.

  Bring something with me that I put in front of iconic scenery worldwide (again, maybe it’s the hamster).

  Hold the hand of a girl who is walking in front of me in a scenic location.

  Take pictures of a person’s silhouette standing in front of the majesty of nature. Maybe the subject has their arms in a “Victory V” formation.

  Text- or caption-based tropes I avoid

  Overshare my own inner pain to try to elicit responses from people.

  Ask questions to my followers to spur an artificial conversation ala “If you could be anywhere, right now, where would YOU be?”

  Add an inspirational quote under a photo of the Milky Way, like “You are made out of the same stuff that is in the stars.”

  Make a strong statement about this group I believe in, so I can get a lot of comments from people that believe in the same thing, and really stick it to that other group who disagrees with me.

  Running short of photo ideas? Here’s a handful from the brilliant account @insta_repeat.

  This is a great account called @insta_repeat that shows some of the most obvious visual tropes.

  This is another photo you’ll see from travel influencers. I honestly wonder if the average viewer knows that this is a staged, unoriginal photo designed to maximize comments and likes.

  It’s a little bit sad how unoriginal Influencers can be. There is zero creativity. By the way, I have met at least one of the Influencers tagged in this photo, and it is clear she buys 99% of her followers but still makes hundreds of thousands of dollars defrauding travel brands and local tourism boards. For example, Tourism New Zealand gave one of them an all-expenses-paid trip plus cash to come to Queenstown for a boondoggle.

  Don’t worry about what other people are posting. Try to be original—let your posts be a reflection of you, not of other stuff you see on social media.

  Take a Balanced Approach

  Now that I’ve told you most of the traps to avoid, you’re probably wondering if there is anything left that’s safe to post. Of course, plenty! Think of this as a section with some advice about how and why to share your life online. Look, in a way, who am I to tell you? It’s your own life, and you can do whatever you want with it.

  Let’s just think about life here for a minute. Life is a tremendously complex process. Who are you? I mean, who are you, really? It’s a complex question that philosophers have spent a lot of time thinking about.

  At a basic level, we could say that you are a collection of all the interests, hobbies, creations, and relationships around you. Most humans are quite multi-faceted and some of these facets may have nothing to do with another. For example, here’s some stuff that I’m into: photography, anthropology, fiction, Burning Man, mindfulness, my family, my friends, jogging, yoga, hiking, hummus, philosophy, video games, Rick & Morty, writing, recreational drugs, Japan, playing with my dog, and a lot more. I think these things are all great fun to talk about because I find them interesting. You probably have a long list of your own.

  Taking another step back, I think it makes a lot of sense to share who you are with others. Not in an egotistical way, but instead with the goal of maybe finding some common ground with others. It is very natural for all humans to share. Sharing is the foundation for great connections and new, meaningful relationships.

  So how do you do it in a way that doesn’t feed into the social media machine?

  To start, more than anything, I advise you to simply stay positive. No one wants to hear you complain about shit. I promise you. Nobody does. Well, there’s maybe an exception—other compla
iners like to hear people complaining because it gives them an excuse to complain too. Misery loves company. But people who complain all the time have great difficulty being at peace with the world around them—with accepting what already exists. The opposite of complaining is acceptance. People who accept the way the world is are generally more positive people. They use their minds to spread ideas they think are better, and they don’t go throughout the day in a dour mood feeling that the world is out to get them. Life happens for you, not against you.

  Let’s get practical when it comes to sharing online. What kind of images should you share? I suggest you share all sorts of photos and content that represent what a multi-faceted person you are. Maybe you’re into birds, gardening, space, swimming, or your kids. Share the stuff you love.

  Some people will tell you to focus on a “theme,” for consistency. That works sometimes, but it can often be quite one-dimensional, and it doesn’t leave you much room to experiment. Plus, if you go with a theme, it can turn into an albatross around your neck, as you’re then forced to rinse and repeat for your audience well after that topic has become tiresome for you. Additionally, your audience only expects to see a single aspect of your life, which is restricting.

  That said, if your Instagram account is your money-making business “brand,” then there’s a good case to be made that the account can and should be one-dimensional. For example, let’s say you make crazy socks for kids. Well, 100% of your photos can be cute kids wearing your socks.