In the summer of 2016, I was a teenager and finally free. I had just graduated from an all-girls secondary school, and after years of uniforms, strict schedules, and the localized drama of a few hundred girls in one building, life felt like a sudden, breath of fresh air. That year, the world felt expansive, and for the first time, I had a place to document it all: Instagram.
I remember my first few posts. They weren’t “content.” They were digital scraps. A blurry video of my best friends and I twerking to Rihanna’s Work; a mirror selfie with the SnapChat flower filter where the flash obscured half my face; a grainy photo of a plate of spring rolls and samosa’s. Back then, Instagram was my diary, and the post button was an impulse, not a tactical decision.
2016 was a fever dream of cultural monoculture. It was the year of Rae Sremmurd’s Black Beetles challenge. It was the year of the flower crown Snapchat filter—the one that smoothed your skin and gave you glowing, ethereal eyes—and the year we all wore high waisted skinny jeans like they were a second skin. We carried selfie sticks without irony and religiously watched youtube makeup artists with their bold eyebrow blindness
But looking back, what I miss most about 2016 isn’t the fashion or the soundtrack. It’s the version of me that existed online before hyper awareness became internalized. I miss the girl who posted because she was having fun, not because she was building a brand.
The Death of my Digital Diary
Somewhere between 2016 and now, the internet changed. It stopped being a place where we lived and started being a place where we performed.
In mid-2016, Instagram made a move that would fundamentally alter our relationship with reality: they killed the chronological feed. Suddenly, your posts weren’t just seen by your friends in order; they were ranked by an algorithm. To be seen, you had to be “engaging.” To be engaging, you had to be perfect.
This shift hit women the hardest. We moved from “digital rawness” to the era of the “Instagram Baddie” aesthetic. Posting shifted from a reflection of a life lived to a carefully curated exhibit of a life perfected. We stopped sharing the messy half eaten plate of food and started sharing the 26,000 naira avocado toast, but only if the lighting was right.
The Burden of Hyper-Awareness
Today, for a woman to post a photo, she must first navigate a labyrinth of hyper-awareness.
Does this look like I’m trying too hard? Is this “casual” photo actually too messy? Does this fit my grid? Will someone take this out of context?
We have become our own harshest creative directors. We spend forty minutes editing a “photo dump” to make it look like we didn’t spend forty minutes editing it. This is the paradox of modern social media: the more we strive for authenticity, the more performative we become.
In science this is called “Appearance-Related Social Media Consciousness.” It’s the constant, nagging awareness of how you look to others through the screen. It’s the reason your drafts folder is full of photos that are perfectly fine, but not “perfect” enough to survive the scrutiny of the public square.The irony of our digital anxiety is that no one is actually thinking about us as much as we think they are. We lose sleep over a post we posted five minutes ago, while the rest of the world has already scrolled past it. No one noticed the ‘flaw’ in your story, they are unto the next post. We are performing for a crowd that isn’t even looking at the stage, they’re too busy looking at their own reflections.
In 2016, we expressed ourselves without fear because the stakes felt low. Now, the stakes feel like our entire identity. Every post is a data point in a self-constructed narrative. We aren’t just people anymore; we are profiles.
The Performance Fatigue
There is a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from being “on” all the time. Women, in particular, are conditioned to be the objects of the gaze, but social media has allowed us to turn that gaze on ourselves. We are both the performer and the audience, the model and the photographer, the celebrity and the critic.
I miss the “lol idk” energy of 2016. I miss the lowercase captions that actually meant something, rather than the ones chosen because they are on-trend. I miss the era where we didn’t know what an algorithm was, and we certainly didn’t care if it liked us.
Leaving that all-girls school in 2016 felt like a breath of fresh air because I was finally escaping a small, high-pressure environment where everyone was watching everyone else. It’s a bitter irony that ten years later, we’ve built a digital world that functions exactly like a secondary school hallway—only now, the hallway is infinite, and the eyes never close.
Can We Go Back?
There’s a reason 2016 nostalgia is currently trending on TikTok. We are all collectively mourning the digital rawness we lost. We are posting our old, grainy Snapchat memories as a way of saying: I remember who I was before I started overthinking my existence.
Maybe we can’t fully go back to the flower crown era. We know too much now. We know how the apps work; we know how the filters lie; we know that the internet is forever.
But perhaps we can reclaim a small piece of that 2016 spirit. Maybe the next time we have a photo we like—one that is blurry, or “un-aesthetic,” or just plain real—we can hit the post button without checking the lighting, without worrying about the grid, and without asking permission from a version of ourselves that is tired of performing.
I miss the girl who didn’t overthink it. I think it’s time I let her come back out.
