5 Things Bros Should Never Do on Instagram

Once upon a time, I hated Instagram. For many years, I berated all my friends for having accounts because I created the perverse mental design that it was strictly for girls. This belief, and my stubbornness toward anyone or anything that discredited it, prohibited me from ever making an account. Because making an account would render me a hypocrite, which I’d hate even more than my unreasonable hatred of Instagram.

But then again, I stand before you as a man. A man bounded by his own flaws, demons, and, on one particular day last week, unparalleled boredom.

Yes, I made an Instagram. I completely disregarded my absolute dread of peer pressure in adherence of one universal truth: the more conversations I’m included in, the better I feel. I mistakenly live my life by many unreliable narrators, one of which was Patrick Bateman, who said, “I want…to fit…in.”

Here are five things to NEVER do on Instagram, if you’re a self-respecting individual who enjoys the fruits of masculinity and social media success, according to a guy that has never had more than four retweets:

Include Too Many Hashtags

#food. #foodporn. #pornfood. #ilovefoodporn. #ilovefoodandporn. #notmixedtogetherofcourse. Stop before you run into a knife so you can hashtag about the geometrical degree of sharpness. I know your kind. You’re the overzealous dude that can’t wait for his unlimited salad bar and cuts of premature bloodlust at Fogo de Chão. Fogo de Chão is HIGH SOCIETY, which is the only kind of restaurant deemed worthy of 16-33 hashtags. RIGHT? I know being a carnivorous monster with blood dripping down your face at a fine dining restaurant seems fancy, but there’s absolutely no need to Instagram that unbiased manliness.

If you never established your masculinity when you drunkenly punched that shark in the nose during your high school senior week, you never will.

Post More Than Once a Day

Oftentimes, we feel like Instagram is like Snapchat. We have “stories” now. We can post a million seconds worth of “stories” when we’re really just sending a “story” about how our one friend had a drunken stream of consciousness (or a “story”) about how his one friend got baked and saw a zebra climb out of the ocean to murder a horse.

We aren’t “storytellers.” We’re posting pictures on the Internet. Don’t oversell your abilities to make the mundane interesting, which sort of (but not really) leads to my next thing…

Post Pictures of Food

This makes me such a hater considering this item constitutes Instagram’s inherent form. I don’t care. Girls can take pictures of food because many of their introverted questions come from whether they should eat the food they are, in fact, photographing. If they won’t phrase them in question form, I will. Should I eat this egg omelet with the COMPLEMENTARY raspberry jelly on the toast? Great googly moogly, should I eat this spinach dip with Parmesan cheese on it WITH the pita flatbreads our saintly server provided us?

Many of you will dissent from this article because this is, simply, the Internet, but I can swear on my mother’s foreboding grave that I have never posted a picture of food on my Instagram. Look for yourself here, the profile I literally just started, considering the introduction to this article. If I ever post a picture of food, which will undoubtedly never happen as long as my frail physique exists, don’t hesitate to call me a hypocritical mongoloid. I’ve heard worse.

Post Selfies

You knew this was coming, right? This is a no-brainer. There are no filters, no captions, no twilight dolphin orgies congregating in the background that could ever justify a dude posting a selfie.

Selfies are inherently terrible because the singular version is “selfie,” not “selfy.” What the fuck is the world coming to when phonetics are not given one single shred of a shit anymore? Notice how this will be the shortest section of this article. That’s how much I despise the selfie-selfy war that’s raged on for years. No comment here.

Post Pictures of the Ocean

Unless you’ve been to the Samoan lagoons or aquamarine waters of Cuba, which, if you’re American, you surely haven’t, then we’ve all seen the same ocean. Whether you’re on the West Coast or East Coast, it’s all the same Great Pacific garbage patch we’ve all come to know and dread for most of our lives. There’s no desire for anyone to see the worst areas of the ocean, especially on the even larger garbage patch that is the Internet.

America got buttfucked in terms of its natural sea environment. We can win back-to-back World Wars and every Super Bowl ever held, but we can get ourselves a suitable coast of surf to bask in those aforementioned victories? I guess it’s not all bad. We are still America. #jingoism.