Scrolling down my Facebook newsfeed has become something of a reflex to me whenever I get my phone out. Most of the time, I think nothing of it; I swipe through photos of semi-acquaintances, hit the occasional ‘like’, or post the even more occasional desperately witty status update.

But my news feed has recently witnessed an influx of posts that shy away from showcasing avocados on toast for brunch, Prosecco-fuelled nights out, or eating, praying and loving on holiday in Bali. Rather, my friends – in the Facebook sense, that is – are declaring how they are going off social media to avoid the stress and anxiety that comes from seeing other people’s seemingly perfect lives celebrated in status updates, snaps, and tweets.

The trend went trendy big time last year when Essena O’Neill quit Instagram. The Australian teenage social media star had over half a million followers on the platform when she went offline, and not unsurprisingly, her surprise antics made headlines around the world. To explain her change of mind, O’Neill described instagramming as a “contrived perfection made to get attention”. Before logging off for good, she also changed the captions of her photos to reflect the reality behind her filtered life. In one of the photos, O’Neill poses in a tight-fitting, figure-hugging white dress that had been donated to her to sport for her prom – or ‘formal’ as she calls the event as an Australian: “I didn’t pay for the dress, took countless photos trying to look hot for Instagram, the formal made me feel incredibly alone.” Next to another shot, she writes about her bikini-clad self: “stomach sucked in, strategic pose, pushed up boobs. I just want younger girls to know this isn’t candid life, or cool or inspirational.”

The ensuing celebration of O’Neill essentially binning her earner and debunking the myth of perfection projected onto social media suggests that social media users are not, in fact, mindless zombies consuming photoshopped bliss but actually human beings capable of healthy critical thinking.

However, the reception has not been as welcoming for everyone going for an ‘O’Neill’. Model Stina Sanders did not only revel in success after posting a week’s worth of everyday, private, and even taboo photos ranging from her weekly hair removal session to a colonic to help relieve her IBS; while there was an increase in the number of likes her photos brought in, thousands of angry followers also stopped following her account. So lifting the social media veil off of the not-so-filtered reality is still taboo.

However, how people cast themselves on social media is not just a matter of filtering over the blemishes that are life, and gaining or losing followers in the process. Sadly, the way reality is cast into the social media mould can have even life-threatening consequences that are all too real. The latest trend gaining social media notoriety is the influx of fitspiration sites. At its most benign, #thinspo is just about hitting your weekly gym session and adding that broccoli to your plate every now and again; but the harsher uses of the hashtag hide eating disorders, exercise addiction, and other mental health issues.

It is no coincidence that #Fitspo exploded shortly after the #thinspo tag – short for thinspiration and with countless photos of dangerously thin people – was banned from Tumblr in 2012 and Instagram in 2013 for its association with the pro-ana movement. Just like #thinspo, it is a way of measuring self-worth by body measurements and fetishising so-called healthy eating food at a whole new, paradoxically unhealthy level. True, not all finspo can be fit under one umbrella of dangerous behaviour; yet, in its most harmful instances, it is another reminder of why avoiding social media is perhaps not that radical after all, but rather a sane method of self-defence.

In all its artificialness, there is something fundamentally human about how people project themselves on social media. Life is, more or less sadly, a lot about presenting yourself in a certain light, whether virtually or not. Despite t-shirts shouting “this is how I woke up”, those actually rolling out of bed straight into their working days are few and far between. Postmodernism is about building and playing with identities and projecting these in different ways; hipster student clutching a Macbook, nerd girl, or wannabe frat boy – we don’t confine ourselves to one identity but build variations of ourselves as we go. There is no one ‘Real Me’ or ‘Real You’; why would we expect social media to be any more true to an elusive concept of reality?

Of course, in the virtual world, self-representations can be, and are, the result of the opportunity to take hundreds of selfies to find the perfect one for Instagram; walking around town, you are observed all the time, and the lighting might just not be spot-on nor the wind blowing from exactly the right direction. Most importantly, a non-virtual person is not restricted to being just a physical manifestation of an actual thinking, feeling personality.

Perhaps the revelation that social media isn’t, well, ‘real’, isn’t worthy of the headline it commands. After all, the amount of photoshopping, filtering, and re-shooting that goes into a single ‘snap’ is very much not a secret but rather another fact of life, just like the fact that in their non-virtual lives people control their appearances and identities that are not in any way ‘true’ or ‘real’. There just isn’t that much new under the sun, even if the sun happens to be a virtual one.

What distinguishes what we do virtually and offline is the amount of control we exert: what goes onto our social media accounts is much more controlled than what happens in our real life accounts, and in the same way, we can control what, if anything, we take away from social media. You can get off Facebook but you cannot log off from real life without alerting mental health concerns. Yes, I will continue to scroll down my news feed and deal with the occasional angst and jealousy that comes with it; but I respect anyone and everyone who chooses not to. Because that is life, both virtual and real.