Social media is populated with people who gracefully wake up in front of a camera, people who always have a naturally fresh and glowing complexion, people with bodies that defy the laws of Nature, couples who have found true love, and mothers overwhelmed with parental pride.
Social media is populated with people who live in perfectly tidy homes, people who – depending on their means – enjoy filming their 408th Zara unboxing or showing off their countless Hermès or Chanel purses.
It is all too easy to forget that these so-called moments of perfection are staged.
The one who gracefully wakes up in front of the camera first went to put on makeup and do her hair. The naturally fresh and glowing complexion often comes from makeup that may be noticeable in real life but nearly undetectable on camera. Wrinkle-free, cellulite-free bodies owe their supposed perfection, in most cases, to filters or retouching apps.
The great love that is filmed sometimes hides episodes of domestic violence, and the perfect cherubs paraded on social media may in fact live with highly toxic parents.
Perfect homes often conceal, just outside the frame, indescribable messes, and wealth that appears real on screen may actually be fake.
This type of narrative – because we are indeed talking of narrative – aiming for constant perfection raises several issues: first, it encourages destructive overconsumption, particularly harmful in a struggling economy (I’m thinking especially of weekly Zara unboxings or the countless useless gadgets Amazon sells worldwide to help “organize” one’s home). We know that such overconsumption has disastrous ecological and social consequences.
Second, it promotes a dream life that can create lasting distress for those unable to live up to the standards portrayed.
Beyond these issues, this narrative of constant perfection has, in recent years, given rise to another phenomenon: humanity now lives on two parallel levels. We have a real life and we have a digital life – and these two lives often fail to converge.
With this narrative of constant perfection, social media offers us a utopian life where everything is flawless, but even if everything looks beautiful and good, it is a place that does not exist. This non-existence comes from the lack of truth inherent in constant staging, but also from the absence of reality: it is a life that exists only in our minds, absorbed alone in front of our screens and carried everywhere in our mental space.
At the same time, with this same narrative of constant perfection, social media offers us a dystopian life. It resembles real life, but a distorted one, which generates – within actual real life – a form of unhappiness born from the inability to live according to the perfect standards proposed by social media.
So I don’t know whether to call it a dystopian utopia or an utopian dystopia.
If I followed my natural inclination, which often leads me to political reflections – in the societal sense, not the partisan one – I would probably see in the success of these perfect narratives a way to stupefy the masses, to condition them, and to divert public attention from real social debates.
When a population is preoccupied solely with goals of physical and material perfection, little space is left for political or societal reflection.
We are constantly entertained. Bread and circuses. That’s where we are.
Fortunately, these perfect narratives coexist on social media with enriching content, speaking seriously about art history, history in general, politics, geostrategy, economics, or sociology.
Still, the truth is that one must always keep a critical distance from all content offered on social media, never be fooled by it, and never relinquish one’s capacity for reflection.
Let’s go get some fresh air.
Maison Rabih Kayrouz top – Vionnet trousers – Essedue sunglasses – Repetto flat shoes – Pictures by Luciano Menardo
April 17, 2026
