Social Media is an empowering tool in today's society. It is an environment for creativity and social connections. It is an endless source of information and a way for many to express themselves. It provides a convenient place for people with common interests to interact and is extremely convenient. In these ways, social media is a wonderful tool.

However, like most things, social media can be abused. I find this especially prevalent on the particularly popular social media platform, Instagram. Instagram can be used to create an unrealistic depiction of life.  A specific category of those guilty of an unrealistic Instagram account is the seemingly endless number of “outdoor women” on Instagram.

The amount of photos of beautiful girls waking up in their tents with perfectly curled hair, wearing flannels while curled up in their sleeping bags on Instagram is enormous and constantly growing. Their photos are usually captioned with an inspirational quote about adventure or nature. Many of these “outdoor women” claim to be inspiring others to get out and experience the outdoors.
I hope that these outdoor women are inspiring other women to get outside and experience nature who may never find the inspiration to get outside on their own. But I do worry that these “outdoor women” give the rest of us unrealistic expectations for our outdoor experiences. 
From personal experience, I know that many moments in the outdoors are not glamorous or beautiful. In fact, many of my moments in the outdoors are sharply contradictory to those of the outdoor women on Instagram. I have eaten spilled pasta off the forest floor, spent days outdoors without showering, and worn the same clothes for days at a time. The moments were not beautiful, enlightening, or glamourous. In fact, some of my moments outdoors are downright disgusting.

Nonetheless, moments in the outdoors don’t need to be beautiful to be wonderful. In fact, one of the greatest parts of the outdoors is how raw everything is. This is the problem with many of the Instagram photos I see. In some, nature is portrayed as glamorous and charming despite the fact that the nature is wonderful because it is raw and unruly.

When I compare my experiences in the outdoors to the Instagrams I see, they seem to be very different experiences. But in reality, I think our two experiences are probably quite similar. A photo is just a small snapshot of what is going on in a moment. The outdoor women of Instagram probably have moments that are not quite as perfect as their photos imply.

Many of these photos make me wonder how far society as a whole is willing to go to create a perfect Instagram image and question the authenticity of the outdoor women of Instagram. All of us, but specifically those who would like to experience nature, need to recognize that Instagram is not real life. Instagram is a highly selective and highly edited version of reality.

My concern is that when women who are new to outdoor experiences realize that it is not as glamorous as Instagram makes it out to be, they will be discouraged from pursuing experiences in nature as a whole. As a result, they would miss out on the wonder of how nature is both raw and beautiful; both imperfect and wonderful.

In fact, to experience the true beauty of nature, you often have to do things that abandon the glamorous comforts of everyday life. This is not something to fear; this is part of why experiences in nature are so valuable. They require sacrifice of everyday conveniences and are rewarded with beauty beyond what you can see within your everyday comfortable life.

In truth, when looking at these accounts it's hard not to wonder if their Instagram is about their outdoor experiences, or are their outdoor experiences about their Instagram? It is human nature to highlight the good moments and downplay the negative. However, when we only portray the glamorous, we are creating a false reality and thus creating an inauthentic image. This image misses the essence of why nature is so powerful, which is in my opinion a missed opportunity.