Once upon a time, there was a mediocre photo. It was not that mediocre but definitely not as beautiful as the picture that had been taken seconds before. It was the same selfie, five friends in front of a breathtaking mountain range, but one of the friends was not smiling as beautifully as on the photo’s elder sibling. That is why the beautiful photo had been posted in 2017 and attracted admiration for the flicker of 24 hours in its owner’s Instagram story. In the meantime, the not-as-perfect sibling was slumbering in a Google Drive with 15.3 GB of other photos that did not make the cut. They did not make the cut in 2017, not in 2018, and not in 2019. But 2020 was different. All the years before, the owner of the not-as-perfect photo had gathered new, even more perfect photos and added them to his Instagram profile, and they told a gleaming story of his successful life. But 2020 was different. Due to a global pandemic, not-as-perfect photo’s owner could not travel, not meet many friends and thus spent most of the time at his not-so-photogenic desk in home office. But of course, not-as-perfect photo’s owner would have loved to travel and meet his numerous, very instagrammable friends. To show his friends that he missed this life of 2017, 2018, 2019 and the years before, he decided that he would post an old photograph as a reminder of good times. When he looked at his library of pictures, he came across the selfie in the mountains. And he thought that it would not be very original if he posted the same photograph again, so he turned to the next photo in the queue of beauty, in descending order: Not-as-perfect photo. For 24 hours, not-as-perfect photo gleamed in its owner’s Instagram story. He had used a lot of filters and stickers, so that the one friend who was not smiling could actually be imagined smiling. And not-so-perfect photo yielded his owner many friendly emojis with hearts in their eyes in a time where everyone missed the chase for the new, perfect, instagrammable picture.
