Likes On Instagram Quotes

She conquered her demons and wore her scars like wings. 

Behind him, he heard Ronan say, "I like the way you losers thought Instagram before first aid. Fuck off.

She wore the moonlight like lingerie. 

If you are on social media, and you are not learning, not laughing, not being inspired or not networking, then you are using it wrong.

A few drinks and the world was hers— she wore her whiskey like a loaded gun.

LIFE IS A JOURNEY TO FIND THE PEOPLE WEIRD LIKE YOU. —ATTICUS

Share, care, hug like a bear.

... and Lynn is dead inside, like a corpse. She Instagrams methodically, clinically, as if she's gathering evidence for defense, like her entire life is dedicated to proving that she has a life.

She wore his love like a loaded gun. 

On Instagram, I want to change my name to "Nobody" so when someone post something really stupid I can like there post and it will say... "Nobody likes this.

I do think the idea of living your life to the fullest is a little flawed. Like, why is jumping out of an airplane inherently better than reading a book? Or why is living a life that looks good on instagram inherently more meaningful than a life lived quietly? I just don't buy it.

Love drips like honey from the hive, constant, sweet, precious, into your heart each and every moment if you let it.

what you think pushes people away is what lets them in. And, God I sound like an inspirational Instagram post, but not letting people in is what pushes them away.

The more you give up who you are to be liked by other people, it’s a formula for chipping away at your soul. You become a product of what everyone else wants, and not who you’re supposed to be.

The power of love can spread magic to the world like nothing else.

Dance through life flinging kindness like shimmering rainbows. Find your bliss by sharing your heart.

In a situation where every waking moment has become the time in which we make our living, and when we submit even our leisure for numerical evaluation via likes on Facebook and Instagram, constantly checking on its performance like one checks a stock, monitoring the ongoing development of our personal brand, time becomes an economic resource that we can no longer justify spending on “nothing.

Business is not a popularity contest. Views and likes and follows are all important. But ultimately, your business is measured by what's on the P&L and whats on the Balance Sheet. Ultimately, businesses are measured in money.

Talk to yourself like a cherished friend. Treat yourself with love and care. You are perfect, just as you are.

Sharing your kindness sparks understanding all around. Then like fireflies in the night, twinkling love surrounds you.

Soulmates feel like a deep breath of forever

Gus hated feeling anxious. He also hated warm ketchup, loud people, sunburns, parallel parking, jams and jellies, Instagram, Sarah McLachlan’s SPCA commercials, rubber glue, Michael Bay’s DVD commentaries, Michael Bay’s films, Michael Bay, and that weird feeling that tattooed, bearded hipster caused in the pit of his stomach that felt like he had tripped down a flight of stairs into a frozen lake that got lit on fire.

I feel like girls who drink whisky tell good stories.

A filter on Instagram was like if Twitter had a button to make you more clever.

Giving thanks fills you with light and joy so you can shine like the bright star you truly are.

Social media friends are like snowflakes: they fall on you by the thousands, but they melt in seconds.

Life is like a collage. Its individual pieces are arranged to create harmony. Appreciate the artwork of your life.

Pressure knocks at my door A clock ticks and demands its due The lava burns from the floor But not in a game like it used to. So little time to figure it all out So many distractions to prevent success I’m in a dark forest with no path or route But this internal fire knows no rest.

She wore compliments like diamonds.

I wish that future novelists would reject the pressure to write for the betterment of society. Art is not media. A novel is not an 'afternoon special' or fodder for the Twittersphere or material for the journalists to make neat generalizations about culture. A novel is not Buzzfeed or NPR or Instagram or even Hollywood. Let's get clear about that. A novel is a literary work of art meant to expand consciousness. We need novels that live in an amoral universe, past the political agenda described on social media. We have imaginations for a reason. Novels like American Psycho and Lolita did not poison culture. Murderous corporations and exploitative industries did. We need characters in novels to be free to range into the dark and wrong. How else will we understand ourselves?

I keep having the same unkind thought: I am preparing for death and everyone else is on Instagram. I know it's not fair, that life is hard for everyone, but I sometimes feel like I'm the only one in the world who is dying. We're all sinking slowly but one day while everyone watches, I will run out of air, I am going to go under. Even explaining it, I feel more and more frantic. There will be a day when I can't take my next breath and I will drown.

Here’s a current example of the challenge we face. At the height of its power, the photography company Kodak employed more than 140,000 people and was worth $28 billion. They even invented the first digital camera. But today Kodak is bankrupt, and the new face of digital photography has become Instagram. When Instagram was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars in 2012, it employed only thirteen people. Where did all those jobs disappear to? And what happened to the wealth that those middle-class jobs created? This book is built to answer questions like these, which will only become more common as digital networking hollows out every industry, from media to medicine to manufacturing.

For many years when I have heard nice people try to be respectful about describing undocumented people, I’ve heard them call us “undocumented workers” as a euphemism, as if there was something uncouth about being just an undocumented person standing with your hands clasped together or at your sides. I almost wish they’d called us something rude like “crazy fuckin’ Mexicans” because that’s acknowledging something about us beyond our usefulness—we’re crazy, we’re Mexican, we’re clearly unwanted!—but to describe all of us, men, women, children, locally Instagram-famous teens, queer puppeteers, all of us, as workers in order to make us palatable, my god. We were brown bodies made to labor, faces pixelated.

Ma’s Instagram profile is classic Ma. She heavily filters photos of meals and selfies. She’s a total abuser of hashtags. #It #Is #Really #Hard #To #Read #Entire #Captions #Like #This. She noticed when I stopped following her.

It all goes back to the red string of my imaginary kite—if you believe something, other people will believe it, too. You can’t convince someone else—whether it’s a potential employer, a loan officer at the car dealership, or someone you’ve been crushing on—that you’re amazing and terrific if you don’t actually think you are. This isn't the false confidence that comes from getting a bunch of "likes" on your Instagram selfies, but a deep-down, unshakeable self-confidence that persists even when things aren't going all that great.

So there are pics of Tucker’s mighty wang on the internet?” “I haven’t been tagged on Instagram yet, so I’m hopeful they aren’t out there. But thanks for calling my dick mighty. We appreciate that.” Amusement colors his words. “We? As in you and your penis?” “Yup,” he says cheerfully. I snuggle deeper under the covers. “You have a name for your penis?” “Doesn’t everyone? Guys put a name on everything that’s important to them—cars, dicks. One of my teammates in junior hockey named his stick, which was dumb because sticks break all the time. He’d gone through twelve of them by the end of the season.” “What were the names?” “That’s the thing. He just kept adding a number to the end, like iPhone 6, iPhone 7, except in his case it was Henrietta 1, Henrietta 2, et cetera.” I snicker. “He should’ve used the hurricane naming convention.” “Darlin’, he wasn’t smart enough to come up with two names, let alone twelve.

Online reward mechanisms beg to substitute for offline ones, and then overtake them. This is why everyone tries to look so hot and well-traveled on Instagram; this is why everyone seems so smug and triumphant on Facebook; this is why, on Twitter, making a righteous political statement has come to seem, for many people, like a political good in itself. This practice is often called “virtue signaling,

Do not be angry with the dormant friends you have on Facebook and on social media who do not LIKE or comment on your statuses and pictures, and do not congratulate you on your birthday. See them just as the regular passengers you meet every morning on the train and bus on your way to work, and with whom you do not exchange greetings ― the only thing you share being just passengers on board the same train and bus.

Not everyone lives in a trash can just because they have kids. My home is orderly and neat because I care. Shame on you.” Response: “Your home is orderly and neat because the only thing you love more than your kid are Instagram likes. Go eat a bag of dicks.

Did I really like cooking, or did I just like the way my Instagram photos of home-cooked meals made me look like a balanced, well-adjusted adult? How many of my beliefs and preferences were actually mine, I wondered, and how many had been put there by machines?

Just like the most beautiful symphonies my words are my piano keys.

Come close - let our hearts beat like one, we'll be the two that became one. Love is the rhythm of our night.

Her love was like endless summer nights -unforgettable.

Like a well-oiled machine, we’ve all been connected since the beginning of time through a beautiful, mystical process of unity.

She is a fantasy Her soul roar like a lion Her mind blooms like a flower Her heart is fierce like a tiger She is a magic that happens in a cruel world.

When that grew boring, she scrolled Twitter, which was like being bathed in the dirty water of other people's thoughts. On Instagram, she was in a deep, deep ad loop.

Forgetting someone you once loved: it’s like erasing something of yourself forever -freely; Being someone else for a second that will change a lifetime. You let go. You feel lost. You will live.

Instagram’s early popularity was less about the technology and more about the psychology—about how it made people feel. The filters made reality look like art. And then, in cataloging that art, people would start to think about their lives differently, and themselves differently, and their place in society differently.

keep having the same unkind thought—I am preparing for death and everyone else is on Instagram. I know that’s not fair—that life is hard for everyone—but I sometimes feel like I’m the only one in the world who is dying.

Ethanol is a volatile, flammable, colourless liquid with a slight chemical odour. It is used as an antiseptic, a solvent, in medical wipes and antibacterial formulas because it kills organisms by denaturing their proteins. Ethanol is an important industrial ingredient. Ethanol is a good general purpose solvent and is found in paints, tinctures, markers and personal care products such as perfumes and deodorants. The largest single use of ethanol is as an engine fuel and fuel additive. In other words, we drink, for fun, the same thing we use to make rocket fuel, house paint, anti-septics, solvents, perfumes, and deodorants and to denature, i.e. to take away the natural properties of, or kill, living organisms. Which might make sense on some level if we weren’t a generation of green minded, organic, health-conscious, truth seeking individuals. But we are. We read labels, we shun gluten, dairy, processed foods, and refined sugars. We buy organic, we use natural sunscreen and beauty products. We worry about fluoride in our water, smog in our air, hydrogenated oils in our food, and we debate whether plastic bottles are safe to drink from. We replace toxic cleaning products with Mrs. Myers and homemade vinegar concoctions. We do yoga, we run, we SoulCycle and Fitbit, we go paleo and keto, we juice, we cleanse. We do coffee enemas and steam our yonis, and drink clay and charcoal, and shoot up vitamins, and sit in infrared foil boxes, and hire naturopaths, and shamans, and functional doctors, and we take nootropics and we stress about our telomeres. These are all real words. We are hyper-vigilant about everything we put into our body, everything we do to our body, and we are proud of this. We Instagram how proud we are of this, and we follow Goop and Well+Good, and we drop 40 bucks on an exercise class because there are healing crystals in the floor. The global wellness economy is estimated to be worth $4 trillion. $4 TRILLION DOLLARS. We are on an endless and expensive quest for wellness and vitality and youth. And we drink fucking rocket fuel.

This book is about how to hold open that place in the sun. It is a field guide to doing nothing as an act of political resistance to the attention economy, with all the stubbornness of a Chinese “nail house” blocking a major highway. I want this not only for artists and writers, but for any person who perceives life to be more than an instrument and therefore something that cannot be optimized. A simple refusal motivates my argument: refusal to believe that the present time and place, and the people who are here with us, are somehow not enough. Platforms such as Facebook and Instagram 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. Solitude, observation, and simple conviviality should be recognized not only as ends in and of themselves, but inalienable rights belonging to anyone lucky enough to be alive. —

I post Instagram photos that I think of as testaments to my beauty and then obsessively check the likes to see if the internet agrees. I collect this data more than I want to admit, trying to measure my allure as objectively and brutally as possible. I want to calculate my beauty to protect myself, to understand exactly how much power and lovability I have.

which everyone was a criminal. I tried to talk to Lindsay about all this. But though she was generally sympathetic to my concerns, she wasn’t so sympathetic that she was ready to go off the grid, or even off Facebook or Instagram. “If I did that,” she said, “I’d be giving up my art and abandoning my friends. You used to like being in touch with other people.

I haven’t a clue either. I’m just someone struggling to recognize their messy life in a world of perfect Instagram ones and feeling like a bit of a fuck-up. Even worse, a forty-something fuck-up. Someone who reads a life-affirming quote and feels exhausted, not inspired. Who isn’t trying to achieve new goals, or set more challenges, because life is enough of a challenge as it is. And who does not feel #blessed and #winningatlife but mostly #noideawhatthefuckIamdoing and #canIgoogleit?

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by Facebook, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through photo slideshows at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connections of their youth through the machinery of night, who clicking and poking and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural brightness of tiny screens floating across the tops of cities contemplating likes, who bared their brains to the network and saw who got pregnant and who got fat and who’s living the life best lived by posting Instagrams of themselves staggering on tenement roofs illuminated, who passed through newly cropped profile pics with radiant cool eyes obsessing over whose ex’s new lover is the best looking ex-lover’s lover, who breaking their backs falling out of ergonomic chairs while shouting into the icy streets, Everybody look how clever I am, Look how much fun I am having, Look at this amazing party I went to, Look at how well-liked I am, Look at my effortless carefully constructed casual desperate thrown together fun, Everybody look, This is fun, Look, Look, I swear to God I am having so much fun.

When I’m done, I ceremonially delete the Instagram app and move my banking app to the exact spot where it used to sit. I get in bed and scroll through my account. The big deposit, the interest. It’s infinitely satisfying, and I wish there was a like button to press.

Jake still won’t talk to me, and I miss him so much, it’s like I’ve been hollowed out by a nuclear blast and there’s nothing left but ashes fluttering inside brittle bones. I’ve sent him dozens of texts that aren’t only unanswered; they’re unread. He unfriended me on Facebook and unfollowed me on Instagram and Snapchat. He’s pretending I don’t exist and I’m starting to think he’s right. If I’m not Jake’s girlfriend, who am I?

Yes, it stressed me out to be asked about my plans for my one (ONE) wild and precious life, but I will still like this phrase every time someone has turned it into art on Pinterest or Instagram. I will try not to let it stress me out. I will try to be better. I will try to bring more love to the world.

Go on, right now, and look up the Instagram and Twitter profiles of all the men you know. How many of them list father or husband to @theirwife’sname in their bios? Not many, I’d guess, because men are raised to view themselves as multifaceted beings, with complexities and contradictions and prismatic identities. And when they only have a certain number of characters in which to describe themselves, when they reduce themselves to just one or two things, it is more likely their profession

Love yourself like you would a treasured love or a cherished child.

when it comes to online life, women just don’t respond well to other women’s success—if comparison is the thief of joy, Instagram is the cat burglar of contentment.

To me, infrared photography is not a special effect like some Instagram filter, it's a different way of looking at photography and light and the world itself.

No—” I sigh, forlorn. “No, we look like the kind of couple who would tag one another in their Instagram biographies.” “Oh, fuck—” BJ starts to laugh. “We do a bit.

I really, really like Suzana Delgado, who is the most beautiful girl in the eighth grade and probably the world. She has like 183 million Instagram followers.

I’m still addicted to the sensation I get watching a post go crazy with comments and likes on Instagram. Casually snapping a picture and uploading it for 28 million people provides a pretty serious high. There’s a thrill in knowing that folks all over the world might be talking about what I posted. It’s quite a rush to create a tidal wave like that whenever I want.

The imbalanced power relationship is in your face all the time. Don’t you feel humiliated using one of the Facebook brands, like Instagram or WhatsApp? Facebook is the first public company controlled by one person.32 I mean, I don’t personally have anything against Mark Zuckerberg. It isn’t about him. But why would you subordinate a big part of your life to any one stranger?

He’s wearing a dark-green henley in this fancy-ass restaurant. Under-dressed, again, like his entire brand is Instagram lumbersexual and he can’t risk being spotted wearing business casual.

This woman controls my heartbeats. Every love lyric I sing each night is made for her. Every melody chases her heartbeat, and every chorus begs for her love. It has been brought to my attention that a few people on my management team have chosen to approach the love of my life and tell her that she wasn't good for my image. Due to her looks and the past she had no say in creating, they said she wasn't good enough. It's true, we grew up in the same town, but that didn't mean our home lives were built on the same steady foundation. I was blessed enough to never know struggle. This girl had to fight tooth and nail for everything she was given. She sacrificed her own youth, because she didn't want her little sister to go into the foster system. She gave up love, in order for me to go chase my dreams. She gives and gives in order to make others happy, because that's the person she is. She's the most beautiful human being alive, and for anyone--especially people who are supposed to be in my corner--to say differently disgusts me to my core. I am not a robot. I hurt, I ache, I love, and I cry. And it breaks me to live in a world where I have to be afraid of showing who I really am in order to gain followers. So if you don't like this fact--that I am not single and that I am hopelessly in love--then that's fine. If I lose fans over this, I'm okay with that. I will make every sacrifice in the world from this point on in order to give my love fully to the woman who has given more than she ever should've had to give. I love you, Haze. From the new moon to the fullest. From now until forever.

The world is getting noisier. We've gone from boomboxes to Walkmen to portable CD players to iPods to any song we want, whenever we want it. We've gone from the four television channels of my childhood to the seeming infinity of cable and streaming. As technology moves us faster and faster through time and space, it seems to feel like story is getting pushed out of the way, I mean, literally pushed out of the narrative. But even as our engagement with stories change, or the trappings around it morph from book to audio to Instagram to Snapchat, we must remember our finger beneath the words. Remember that story, regardless of the format, has always taken us to places we never thought we'd go, introduced us to people we never thought we'd meet and shown us worlds that we might have missed. So as technology keeps moving faster and faster, I am good with something slower. My finger beneath the words has led me to a life of writing books for people of all ages, books meant to be read slowly, to be savored.

I feel like being psychic might just be the natural result of what happens when you actually just listen to someone without being a distracted spaz plotting your next Instagram post during a conversation.

A fire burns in the evening sky Breaking like an egg in a pan A sea of yellowish orange spreads In accordance with divine plan.  Vibrant paint drips to the edge Of ashen clouds drifting past The sun is a messy painter Every brush stroke massive and vast. The clouds are like matches Starting as fiery flame Then fading to ashes  A burning passion, tamed.  The red, orange, yellow leaves On the ground in this season Reflect the colors of the sky, and The sunlight that used to feed them.  A September sunset beaming  Down as a sailor's last call A herald for the coming winter A message, enjoy the fleeting fall. 

Then, on impulse, I scroll back through my previous Instagram posts, looking at the photos of London cafes, sights, drinks, and smiling faces (mostly strangers). The whole thing is like a feel-good movie, and what's wrong with that? Loads of people use colored filters or whatever on Instagram. Well, my filter is the “this is how I'd like it to be” filter. It's not that I lie. I was in those places, even if I couldn't afford a hot chocolate. It's just I don't dwell on any of the not-so-great stuff in my life, like the commute or the prices or having to keep all my stuff in a hammock. Let alone vanilla-whey-coated eggs and abnoxious lechy flatmates. And the point is, it's something to aspire to, something to hope for. One day my life will match my Instagram posts. One day.

After university, Annie [Smith Peck] was once again warned against the dangers of ~a lady~ moving around the country to different teaching jobs, let alone to Europe to carry on her studies, which she very much wanted to do. Her mother warned her what it might look like for a young woman to travel alone to Europe like a giant slut, but Annie replied: 'I have lived long enough to have got beyond trying to make all my actions satisfactory to my numerous friends and acquaintances.' Whack that over a sunset and put it on Instagram, friends.

Believing that God is not only watching you but has high expectations creates one kind of society. Believing that getting “likes” on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or Snapchat (or whatever comes next) undoubtedly creates another kind. The average iPhone user unlocks his or her phone at least eighty times per day, and that number is rising every year. 8 And yet, despite the fact each of us has access to more information in our pockets than any scholar in the world had twenty years ago, we don’t use it. We drown in information but we starve for knowledge.

When parents matter more than peers, they can teach right and wrong in a meaningful way. They can prioritize attachments within the family over attachments with same-age peers. They can foster better relationships between their child and other adults. They can help their child develop a more robust and more authentic sense of self, grounded not in how many “likes” a photo gets on Instagram or Facebook but in the child’s truest nature. They can educate desire, instilling a longing for higher and better things, in music, in the arts, and in one’s own character.

In fact, a whole ex-girlfriend themed ghost train sounded genuinely terrifying. You'd get in and instead of a mummy mannequin covered in toilet roll popping out, it's her and you look down and you're wearing a baggy old jumper with a stain on the front. You turn the corner and you find yourself being forced to scroll through her Instagram and there are replies from a girl with tattoos and she looks exactly like the celebrity your ex fancies most. Right at the end, they play a video on a loop that's just screenshots of all the pathetic texts you sent when you were too heartbroken to have any dignity.

Social networking technology allows us to spend our time engaged in a hypercompetitive struggle for attention, for victories in the currency of “likes.” People are given more occasions to be self-promoters, to embrace the characteristics of celebrity, to manage their own image, to Snapchat out their selfies in ways that they hope will impress and please the world. This technology creates a culture in which people turn into little brand managers, using Facebook, Twitter, text messages, and Instagram to create a falsely upbeat, slightly overexuberant, external self that can be famous first in a small sphere and then, with luck, in a large one. The manager of this self measures success by the flow of responses it gets. The social media maven spends his or her time creating a self-caricature, a much happier and more photogenic version of real life. People subtly start comparing themselves to other people’s highlight reels, and of course they feel inferior.

As with the transition between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0, the curdling of the social internet happened slowly and then all at once. The tipping point, I'd guess, was around 2012. People were losing excitement about the internet, starting to articulate a set of new truisms. Facebook had become tedious, trivial, exhausting. Instagram seemed better, but would soon reveal its underlying function as a three-ring circus of happiness and popularity and success. Twitter, for all its discursive promise, was where everyone tweeted complaints at airlines and bitched about articles that had been commissioned to make people bitch. The dream of a better, truer self on the internet was slipping away. Where we had once been free to be ourselves online, we were now chained to ourselves online, and this made us self-conscious. Platforms that promised connection began inducing mass alienation. The freedome promised by the internet started to seem like something whose greatest potential lay in the realm of misuse.

like to see more of Vivian and Luca and maybe other Italian bachelors follow in Rafe’s footsteps, too. ;) I’d love to write a new romantic adventure for Rafe and Ari, too (but is that allowed for Kindle Worlds? Mm..).   Oh, and you can also write to me directly. I love hearing from readers. You can reach me via my website, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, or you can also email me.   A list of my works (arranged according to reading order) can be found here and you can also visit my author page on Amazon for book links.   Lastly, for updates on my newest releases and exclusive excerpts for upcoming releases, please consider signing up for my newsletter.   Thank you!

I want this not only for artists and writers, but for any person who perceives life to be more than an instrument and therefore something that cannot be optimized. A simple refusal motivates my argument: refusal to believe that the present time and place, and the people who are here with us, are somehow not enough. Platforms such as Facebook and Instagram 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. Solitude, observation, and simple conviviality should be recognized not only as ends in and of themselves, but inalienable rights belonging to anyone lucky enough to be alive.

There are, of course, real pleasures to be found in self-improvement. 'That the beauty idea is pleasurable AND demanding, and often concurrently, is a key feature,' Widdows writes. The beauty ideal asks you to understand your physical body as a source of potential and control. It provides a tangible way to exert power, although this power has so far come at the expense of most others: porn and modeling and Instagram influencing are the only careers in which women regularly outearn men. But the pleasures of beauty work and the advent of mainstream feminism have both, in any case, mostly exacerbated the situation. If Wolf in 1990 criticized a paradigm where a woman was expected to look like her ideal self all the time, we have something deeper burrowing now—not a beauty myth but a lifestyle myth, a paradigm where a woman can muster all the technology, money, and politics available to her to actually try to BECOME that idealized self, and where she can understand relentless self-improvement as natural, mandatory, and feminist—or just, without a question, the best way to live.

What have you loved? What stands out in your mind as can’t miss Life Attractions?” “I’m not sure. When people make those bucket lists online, they focus on big, flashy things, like going to the top of the Eiffel Tower or swimming with dolphins or whatever. They’re doing those for Instagram, though, or because they think it’s what they’re supposed to want. I guess they do sound impressive when you say them out loud to other people. But everything I remember as being the best moments of my life has been so…small. Like…running through the sprinklers with my best friend on summer break, getting grass stuck all over my wet feet. The first time my baby sister smiled at a silly face I made. My first real Eureka moment in the biochem lab.

This is part of the reason why I feel weird about introducing pronouns when people meet each other in groups; it creates this expectation that each of our genders should be mapped and appropriately invoked at any time, that I'm safer if someone can say exactly what I am, and that I would be harmed if my gender ever confused anyone (or confused me). I'd rather be misgendered than be "accepted" by an establishment that's making some kind of ominous bio/political truth claim about what my transness is. I don't want a trans utopia where there's 200 genders on the census box. I don't want a trans utopia where instagram asks me my pronouns and my sex assigned at birth and then targets marketing at me. I don't want cis people to make money using images of bodies like mine.

Followers Everywhere To start with; Facebook : 10K followers !! Instagram : 710 followers !! Twitter : 20K followers !! Followers!! Followers!! And Followers!! Well, who are these followers? Just more than being a crowd of audience, who are they? Ever thought of? And for what purpose are they following you or someone else? Is it because you are a famous personality, a best friend, or you're someone who holds a high status in the society or just because you're simply rich enough to be followed ? Everyone live their life the way they want to. No one is bound to live under certain limitations or boundaries. Every individual have their own freedom in life. Each one of them is unique too. But what holds us different from others is the work we do for ourselves and for our society. Our behaviour, personality, nature, our attitude towards life and our talents hold us apart from others. Some people are really good and some are really worse than you ever thought of. What I'm trying to say is that some are 'legally' good and they may or may not hold a high position in the society and some are 'illegally' good and they may or may not hold a high position in the society. I just want to say that follow people for who they actually are, for the good work they do for themselves and for everyone. And respect them by being their true follower in a true sense. The person whom you follow doesn't need to be a rich or poor. A person should be rich by heart and poor by wealth! Even I'm not someone to be followed, yet I do have a few followers. It's not because I'm some great personality or a renowned writer, but might be because they like my work. And I feel happy for that. And I thank God for blessing me with this wonderful skill of writing. Even I follow many people including some really great personalities for their good work and for their kind way of serving the society and the poor. And I believe that, this is the true way to show respect for them.

And she figures it’s your fault that things have changed.” “That’s just idiotic!” Ximena said. “I know!” I said. “It’s like Savanna being mad at me for having been in a TV commercial once. It makes no sense.” “How do you know all this?” asked Ximena. “Did she tell you?” “No!” I said. “Did you know about the note beforehand?” “No!” I said. Summer rescued me. “So what did Ellie say when she read Maya’s note?” she asked Ximena. “Oh, she was so mad,” answered Ximena. “She and Savanna want to go all out on Maya, post something super-mean about her on Facebook or whatever. Then Miles drew this cartoon. They want to post it on Instagram.” She nodded for Summer to hand me a folded-up piece of loose-leaf paper, which I opened. On it was a crude drawing of a girl (who was obviously Maya) kissing a boy (who was obviously Auggie Pullman).

As digital technology reduces the need for labor in many industries, the proportion of the rewards returned to those who own the intelligent machines is growing. A venture capitalist in today’s economy can fund a company like Instagram, which was eventually sold for a billion dollars, while employing only thirteen people. When else in history could such a small amount of labor be involved in such a large amount of value?

That doesn’t explain this weird nudity thing.” “Well, it’s not like we change shapes fully clothed.” “That can get awkward,” Hayder added. “A lioness in a G-string is a dangerous sight to see.” “Dangerous how?” Kira dared asked. “Because the Instagram pic I took of it got me pounced on by a trio of them, and they waxed me from head to toe.” Hayder shook his head, in rueful remembrance. Kira snickered. “I would have used Nair. It lasts longer.

There were absolutely amazing photographs everywhere, on everyone's Facebook page and everyone's iPhone and Instagram, just floating around in cyberspace for eternity. People took hundreds and thousands of digital pictures; one or two, even twenty or a hundred, were bound to be great. All anyone had to do was click through them all and post the ones they liked, deleting the rest. But using film meant you never knew what was going to be a good picture, let alone a great one, until you were standing there looking at a contact sheet with a magnifying glass and deciding which to print. Maybe nobody cared anymore, but then again, writers probably felt the same way when word processors were invented. Anyone with a story and a keyboard could write their memoir now, write the great American novel, or tweet a 140-character trope that gets retweeted and it read by hundreds of people every hour of every day.

It seems that we are distracted because we are always in search of something better. We always want to see a different place or a different person’s life, as ours passes us by. We don’t pay attention to our own lives, therefore we want someone else’s. In a way, this is the definition of our social media feed. I want your life; please ‘like’ mine and tell me that it’s good enough. The thing is, most of us live the life that we are searching for. We just aren’t aware enough to see it. We are half present, therefore half appreciative, and our relationships suffer because of it.

It was a wake-up call to me to learn that Airbnb was by no means unique: Instagram started as a location-based social network called Burbn (which had an optional photo feature). It attracted a core group of users and more than $500,000 in funding. And yet the founders realized that its users were flocking to only one part of the app—the photos and filters. They had a meeting, which one of the founders recounts like this: “We sat down and said, ‘What are we going to work on next? How are we going to evolve this product into something millions of people will want to use? What is the one thing that makes this product unique and interesting?’”7 The service soon retooled to become Instagram as we know it: a mobile app for posting photos with filters. The result? One hundred thousand users within a week of relaunching. Within eighteen months, the founders sold Instagram to Facebook for $1 billion. I know that seems simple, that the marketing lesson from Instragram is that they made a product that was just awesome. But that’s good news for you—it means there’s no secret sauce, and the second your product gets to be that awesome, you can see similar results. Just look at Snapchat, which essentially followed the same playbook by innovating in the mobile photo app space, blew up with young people, and skyrocketed to a $3.5-billion-dollar valuation with next-to-no marketing.

Esperanza Impossible Sonnet 18 Clothes or the lack of it, don't make, A person obscene, only behavior does. Who are you to judge someone's expression, But, here there are plenty grey areas! Problem is, when obscenity becomes expression, Misbehavior is deemed declaration of independence. Too many people confuse attention with admiration, And a stunt as some wonderful achievement. Accepting obscenity as freedom of expression, Is like showing tolerance to intolerance. Posing butt naked on instagram, unless you're pornstar, Is like barging into capitol with a flag confederate. We must find a balance between comfort and conscience. Civilization falls apart when we can't tell the difference.

I go to one of my favorite Instagram profiles, the.korean.vegan, and I watch her last video, in which she makes peach-topped tteok. The Korean vegan, Joanne, cooks while talking about various things in her life. As she splits open a peach, she explains why she gave up meat. As she adds lemon juice, brown sugar, nutmeg, a pinch of salt, cinnamon, almond extract, maple syrup, then vegan butter and vegan milk and sifted almond and rice flour, she talks about how she worried about whitewashing her diet, about denying herself a fundamental part of her culture, and then about how others don't see her as authentically Korean since she is a vegan. I watch other videos by Joanne, soothed by her voice into feeling human myself, and into craving the experiences of love she talks of and the food she cooks as she does. I go to another profile, and watch a person's hands delicately handle little knots of shirataki noodles and wash them in cold water, before placing them in a clear oden soup that is already filled with stock-boiled eggs, daikon, and pure white triangles of hanpen. Next, they place a cube of rice cake in a little deep-fried tofu pouch, and seal the pouch with a toothpick so it looks like a tiny drawstring bag; they place the bag in with the other ingredients. "Every winter my mum made this dish for me," a voice says over the video, "just like how every winter my grandma made it for my mum when she was a child." The person in the video is half Japanese like me, and her name is Mei; she appears on the screen, rosy cheeked, chopsticks in her hand, and sits down with her dish and eats it, facing the camera. Food means so much in Japan. Soya beans thrown out of temples in February to tempt out demons before the coming of spring bring the eater prosperity and luck; sushi rolls eaten facing a specific direction decided each year bring luck and fortune to the eater; soba noodles consumed at New Year help time progress, connecting one year to the next; when the noodles snap, the eater can move on from bad events from the last year. In China too, long noodles consumed at New Year grant the eater a long life. In Korea, when rice-cake soup is eaten at New Year, every Korean ages a year, together, in unison. All these things feel crucial to East Asian identity, no matter which country you are from.

Already, when Facebook bought Instagram, it felt as though the walls of the Internet were closing in a little tighter around us users. The broad expanse of possibility, of messiness, on a network like Geocities or the personal expression of Tumblr was shut down. Digital life became increasingly templated, a set of boxes to fill in rather than a canvas to cover in your own image. (You don’t redesign how your Facebook profile looks; you just change your avatar.) I felt a certain sense of loss, but at first the trade-off of creativity for broadcast reach seemed worthwhile: You could talk to so many people at once on social media! But that exposure became enervating, too, and I missed the previous sense of intimacy, the Internet as a private place—a hideout from real life, rather than the determining force of real life. As the walls closed in, the algorithmic feeds took on more and more influence and authority.

On the third day after all hell broke loose, I come upstairs to the apartment, finished with my shift and so looking forward to a hot shower. Well, lukewarm—but I’ll pretend it’s hot. But when I pass Ellie’s room, I hear cursing—Linda Blair-Exorcist-head-spinning-around kind of cursing. I push open her door and spot my sister at her little desk, yelling at her laptop. Even Bosco barks from the bed. “What’s going on?” I ask. “I just came up but Marty’s down there on his own—he won’t last longer than ten minutes.” “I know, I know.” She waves her hand. “I’m in a flame war with a toxic bitch on Twitter. Let me just huff and puff and burn her motherfucking house down…and then I’ll go sell some coffee.” “What happened?” I ask sarcastically. “Did she insult your makeup video?” Ellie sighs, long and tortured. “That’s Instagram, Liv—I seriously think you were born in the wrong century. And anyway, she didn’t insult me—she insulted you.” Her words pour over me like the ice-bucket challenge. “Me? I have like two followers on Twitter.” Ellie finishes typing. “Boo-ya. Take that, skank-a-licious!” Then she turns slowly my way. “You haven’t been online lately, have you?” This isn’t going to end well, I know it. My stomach knows it too—it whines and grumbles. “Ah, no?” Ellie nods and stands, gesturing to her computer. “You might want to check it out. Or not—ignorance is bliss, after all. If you do decide to take a peek, you might want to have some grain alcohol nearby.” Then she pats my shoulder and heads downstairs, her blond ponytail swaying behind her. I glance at the screen and my breath comes in quick, semi-panicked bursts and my blood rushes like a runaway train in my veins. I’ve never been in a fight, not in my whole life. The closest I came was sophomore year in high school, when Kimberly Willis told everyone she was going to kick the crap out of me. So I told my gym teacher, Coach Brewster—a giant lumberjack of a man—that I got my period unexpectedly and had to go home. He spent the rest of the school year avoiding eye contact with me. But it worked—by the next day, Kimberly found out Tara Hoffman was the one talking shit about her and kicked the crap out of her instead

Being capable and productive feels somewhat beside the point these days. Either you're popular, and therefore exciting and successful and a winner, or you're unpopular, and therefore unimportant and invisible and devoid of redeeming value. Being capable was much more celebrated in the 1970s when I was growing up. People had real jobs that lasted a lifetime back then, and many workers seemed to embrace the promise that if you worked steadily and capably for years, you would be rewarded for it. Even without those rewards, working hard and knowing how to do things seemed like worthwhile enterprises in themselves. "Can she back a cherry pie, Billy Boy, Billy Boy?" my mom used to sing while rolling out pie crust with her swift, dexterous hands. Sexist as its message may have been, the modern version of that song might be worse. It would center around taking carefully staged and filtered photos of your pretty face next to a piece of cherry pie and posting it to your Instagram account, to be rewarded with two thousand red hearts for your efforts. Making food, tasting it, sharing it, understanding yourself as a human who can do things - all of this is flattened down to nothing, now, since only one or two people would ever know about it. Better to feed two thousand strangers an illusion than engage in real work to limited ends.

her room now?” They were led down the hall by Beth. Before she turned away she took a last drag on her smoke and said, “However this comes out, there is no way my baby would have had anything to do with something like this, drawing of this asshole or not. No way. Do you hear me? Both of you?” “Loud and clear,” said Decker. But he thought if Debbie were involved she had already paid the ultimate price anyway. The state couldn’t exactly kill her again. Beth casually flicked the cigarette down the hall, where it sparked and then died out on the faded runner. Then she walked off. They opened the door and went into Debbie’s room. Decker stood in the middle of the tiny space and looked around. Lancaster said, “We’ll have the tech guys go through her online stuff. Photos on her phone, her laptop over there, the cloud, whatever. Instagram. Twitter. Facebook. Tumblr. Wherever else the kids do their electronic preening. Keeps changing. But our guys will know where to look.” Decker didn’t answer her. He just kept looking around, taking the room in, fitting things in little niches in his memory and then pulling them back out if something didn’t seem right as weighed against something else. “I just see a typical teenage girl’s room. But what do you see?” asked Lancaster finally. He didn’t look at her but said, “Same things you’re seeing. Give me a minute.” Decker walked around the small space, looked under piles of papers, in the young woman’s closet, knelt down to see under her bed, scrutinized the wall art that hung everywhere, including a whole section of People magazine covers. She also had chalkboard squares affixed to one wall. On them was a musical score and short snatches of poetry and personal messages to herself: Deb, Wake up each day with something to prove. “Pretty busy room,” noted Lancaster, who had perched on the edge of the girl’s desk. “We’ll have forensics come and bag it all.” She looked at Decker, obviously waiting for him to react to this, but instead he walked out of the room. “Decker!” “I’ll be back,” he called over his shoulder. She watched him go and then muttered, “Of all the partners I could have had, I got Rain Man, only giant size.” She pulled a stick of gum out of her bag, unwrapped it, and popped it into her mouth. Over the next several minutes she strolled the room and then came to the mirror on the back of the closet door. She appraised her appearance and ended it with the resigned sigh of a person who knows their best days physically are well in the past. She automatically reached for her smokes but then decided against it. Debbie’s room could be part of a criminal investigation. Her ash and smoke could only taint that investigation.

Most of my friends put their preferred pronoun in their Instagram bios—he/she, him/her, they/their—but I respond to any and all of them. I like to think of it as collecting pronouns: the more I get, the more fun I’m having. To get the obvious out of the way, because that’s apparently important to people, I think of myself as post-gender. I was trying to figure out how to explain that because sometimes it’s a paragraph and sometimes it’s a term paper depending on who I’m talking to, and I have no idea who will be reading this in the aftermath. Then I noticed that one of my fellow passengers has a cat with him, and that’s perfect. When you visit a friend and find they have a cat, you just see it as a cat in all its pure catness, it doesn’t require further definition. You’ll probably get a name, and if you ask, whether it was born male or female, but even after you have that information you still don’t think of it any differently. It’s not a He-Cat or a She-Cat or a They-Cat. It’s just a cat. And unless the cat’s name has any gender-specific connotations you’ll probably forget pretty fast which gender it was born into. My name is Theo, and by that logic, I am a cat. What I was or was not born into has nothing to do with how I see myself. It’s not about going from one gender to another, or suggesting that they don’t exist. Some of my friends say that the moment you talk about gender you invalidate the conversation because you’re accepting the limits of outmoded paradigms, but I’m not sure I agree with that. I just think gender shouldn’t matter. If you’re a man, aren’t there moments when you feel more female, like when you’re listening to music, or your cheek is being gently stroked, or you see a spectacularly handsome man walk into the room? If you’re a woman, aren’t there moments when you feel more male, when you have to be strong in the face of conflict, or stand behind your opinion, or when a spectacularly beautiful woman walks into the room? Well, in those moments, you are all of those things, so why deny that part of yourself? For me, it’s not about being binary or non-binary. It’s about moving the needle to the center of the dial and accepting all definitions as equally true while remaining free to shift in emphasis from moment to moment. It’s about being a Person, not a She-Person or a He-Person or a They-Person. (...) When you go into a clothing store, you don’t just go to the “one size fits all” rack. You look for clothes that fit your waist, hips, legs, chest, and neck, clothes that complement your form and shape, and reflect not just how you see yourself but how you want to be seen by others. If it’s still not quite right, and you can afford it, you get the clothes tailored to fit exactly who you are. That’s what I’m doing. Post-gender is one term for it. Another might be tailored gender. Maybe bespoke gender. But definitely not one-size-fits-all. The world doesn’t get to decide what best fits who I am and how I choose to be seen. I do.

Here’s some startup pedagogy for you: When confronted with any startup idea, ask yourself one simple question: How many miracles have to happen for this to succeed? If the answer is zero, you’re not looking at a startup, you’re just dealing with a regular business like a laundry or a trucking business. All you need is capital and minimal execution, and assuming a two-way market, you’ll make some profit. To be a startup, miracles need to happen. But a precise number of miracles. Most successful startups depend on one miracle only. For Airbnb, it was getting people to let strangers into their spare bedrooms and weekend cottages. This was a user-behavior miracle. For Google, it was creating an exponentially better search service than anything that had existed to date. This was a technical miracle. For Uber or Instacart, it was getting people to book and pay for real-world services via websites or phones. This was a consumer-workflow miracle. For Slack, it was getting people to work like they formerly chatted with their girlfriends. This is a business-workflow miracle. For the makers of most consumer apps (e.g., Instagram), the miracle was quite simple: getting users to use your app, and then to realize the financial value of your particular twist on a human brain interacting with keyboard or touchscreen. That was Facebook’s miracle, getting every college student in America to use its platform during its early years. While there was much technical know-how required in scaling it—and had they fucked that up it would have killed them—that’s not why it succeeded. The uniqueness and complete fickleness of such a miracle are what make investing in consumer-facing apps such a lottery. It really is a user-growth roulette wheel with razor-thin odds. The classic sign of a shitty startup idea is that it requires at least two (or more!) miracles to succeed. This was what was wrong with ours. We had a Bible’s worth of miracles to perform:

Excuse me,” someone said, interrupting a lively discussion about whom they’d each buy a drink for in the cantina. The whole line looked up. There were two women standing on the sidewalk with bakery boxes. One of them cleared her throat. “We heard that people were camping out for Star Wars . . .” “That’s us!” Troy said, only slightly less enthusiastically than he’d said it yesterday. “Where’s everybody else?” she asked. “Are they around the back? Do you do this in shifts?” “It’s just us,” Elena said. “We’re the Cupcake Gals,” the other woman said. “We thought we’d bring Star Wars cupcakes? For the line?” “Great!” Troy said. The Cupcake Gals held on tight to their boxes. “It’s just . . .” the first woman said, “we were going to take a photo of the whole line, and post it on Instagram . . .” “I can help you there!” Elena said. Those cupcakes were not going to just walk away. Not on Elena’s watch. Elena took a selfie of their line, the Cupcake Gals and a theater employee all holding Star Wars cupcakes—it looked like a snapshot from a crowd— and promised to post it across all her channels. The lighting was perfect. Magic hour, no filter necessary. #CupcakeGals #TheForceACAKEns #SalaciousCrumbs The Gals were completely satisfied and left both boxes of cupcakes. “This is the first time I’ve been happy that there were only three of us,” Elena said, helping herself to a second cupcake. It was frosted to look like Chewbacca. “You saved these cupcakes,” Gabe said. “Those women were going to walk away with them.” “I know,” Elena said. “I could see it in their eyes. I would’ve stopped at nothing to change their minds.” “Thank God they were satisfied by a selfie then,” Gabe said. His cupcake looked like Darth Vader, and his tongue was black. “I’m really good at selfies,” Elena said. “Especially for someone with short arms.” “Great job,” Troy said. “You’ll make someone a great provider someday.” “That day is today,” Elena said, leaning back against the theater wall. “You’re both welcome.” “Errrggh,” Troy said, kicking his feet out. “Cupcake coma.” “How many did you eat?” Gabe asked. “Four,” Troy said. “I took down the Jedi Council. Time for a little midday siesta—the Force asleepens.

She clicks on the last slide, and that’s when it happens. “Me So Horny” blasts out of the speakers and my video, mine and Peter’s, flashes on the projector screen. Someone has taken the video from Anonybitch’s Instagram and put their own soundtrack to it. They’ve edited it too, so I bop up and down on Peter’s lap at triple speed to the beat. Oh no no no no. Please, no. Everything happens at once. People are shrieking and laughing and pointing and going “Oooh!” Mr. Vasquez is jumping up to unplug the projector, and then Peter’s running onstage, grabbing the microphone out of a stunned Reena’s hand. “Whoever did that is a piece of garbage. And not that it’s anybody’s fucking business, but Lara Jean and I did not have sex in the hot tub.” My ears are ringing, and people are twisting around in their seats to look at me and then shifting back around to look at Peter. “All we did was kiss, so fuck off!” Mr. Vasquez, the junior class advisor, is trying to grab the mic back from Peter, but Peter manages to maintain control of it. He holds the mic up high and yells out, “I’m gonna find whoever did this and kick their ass!” In the scuffle, he drops the mic. People are cheering and laughing. Peter’s being frog-marched off the stage, and he frantically looks out into the audience. He’s looking for me. The assembly breaks up then, and everyone starts filing out the doors, but I stay low in my seat. Chris comes and finds me, face alight. She grabs me by the shoulders. “Ummm, that was crazy! He freaking dropped the F bomb twice!” I am still in a state of shock, maybe. A video of me and Peter hot and heavy was just on the projector screen, and everyone saw Mr. Vasquez, seventy-year-old Mr. Glebe who doesn’t even know what Instagram is. The only passionate kiss of my life and everybody saw. Chris shakes my shoulders. “Lara Jean! Are you okay?” I nod mutely, and she releases me. “He’s kicking whoever did it’s ass? I’d love to see that!” She snorts and throws her head back like a wild pony. “I mean, the boy’s an idiot if he thinks for one second it wasn’t Gen who posted that video. Like, wow, those are some serious blinders, y’know?” Chris stops short and examines my face. “Are you sure you’re okay?” “Everybody saw us.” “Yeah…that sucked. I’m sure that was Gen’s handiwork. She must’ve gotten one of her little minions to sneak it onto Reena’s PowerPoint.” Chris shakes her head in disgust. “She’s such a bitch. I’m glad Peter set the record straight, though. Like, I hate to give him credit, but that was an act of chivalry. No guy has ever set the record straight for me.