BeReal and the Performance of Authenticity
“⚠️Time to BeReal.⚠️” My phone buzzes at 7:09 P.M and I rush outside. Why? To pretend I’m watching the sunset. Truthfully, I’ve spent the last hour lying on my bedroom floor, wearing a raggedy old t-shirt, half-finished homework scattered around me while I mindlessly scroll through the same three apps. But the light outside looks half decent—certainly better than another photo of my ceiling, anyway. Glass of water in hand, I slouch into the balcony chair and point my phone at the sky—not quite peak sunset, but close. Real enough? That’s the point. I’m performing authenticity because even here, on an app designed to eliminate envy, I can’t escape feeling less than.
In 2020, BeReal revolutionized the internet, promising to fix social media’s fakeness. BeReal offered a cure for the carefully built Instagram feeds and the wannabe Shakespeare monologues on X (formerly Twitter). Their slogan, “Your Friends for Real,” encapsulated their simple yet powerful goal: force honesty through time pressure. Users get a daily notification at a random time, giving them exactly two minutes to take and share dual-camera photos—one showing your face, and the other revealing your surroundings. The time constraint and dual-camera function restrained users from extensively preparing or curating their photos, something that characterizes other platforms. No time for makeup. No time to hike a mountain. No time to find the perfect lighting. The app even shows how many times you retake the photo—publicly shaming anyone trying to fake spontaneity.
At first, it worked. When I was a high school freshman, I watched BeReal create a social media space where boring life became valuable. I recall my friends and me eagerly awaiting the notification daily, hoping to capture our daily routines and get a peek into others. It felt liberating to see everyone at their most ordinary: my sister studying with messy hair, my best friend eating dinner with her family, and my book club partner waiting for the bus. Everyone’s life looked a little boring, a little chaotic, and a little normal. Social media felt like it was connecting us rather than creating subconscious competition.
Soon enough, the rawness faded. Human nature adapted and envy found new ways to infect the platform. Users discovered they could wait hours to post, shifting random moments into strategic opportunities. I’d open the app to see friends posting “late” at beaches, parties, or scenic spots—their “spontaneous adventures” were somehow always enviably perfect. Simultaneously, my authentic moments—brushing teeth, staring at cursors, or lying in bed—felt increasingly pathetic. My monotonous life didn’t photograph well. Soon I joined them; why not wait until my dinner arrived, or I was walking under a pretty sky? The rules bent easily once we all agreed to bend them. When everyone cheats together, it stops feeling like cheating. BeReal’s two-minute limit turned into a gentle suggestion when we collectively decided that authenticity could wait for a better moment. BeReal hadn’t eliminated envy; it had evolved it into something more cunning.
Envy doesn’t need filters to harm. On Instagram, I could dismiss beautiful bodies as edited, or amazing locations as staged. BeReal stripped away those defenses I cherished. When someone’s unplanned snapshot outshined my carefully considered posts, the envy sank deeper. I was envious of their “just happened to be at a concert” selfies. Their lives weren’t just presented—they were actually better. I found myself envying not their camera quality, but their seemingly effortless ability to always be somewhere interesting.
This pattern haunts every platform that promises to solve social media’s envy problem. Vine, with its six-second videos (2013-2017), gave us peeks into authentic moments without the pressure of sponsored content; still, its brevity made it more suited to comedy than connection. Snapchat promised unpolished and impermanent sharing but quickly became another performative space once Stories and filters gained popularity. Houseparty (2016-2021) tried to recreate the casual hangouts we lost during the COVID-19 pandemic through drop-in video calls and games; nevertheless, the constant notifications eventually became overwhelming, and the end of the pandemic made the app obsolete. Each platform follows a common cycle: starting with dreams of authenticity, achieving viral success, then deteriorating into yet another space for performance. Despite these familiar patterns, BeReal’s design seemed distinct enough to succeed, until we found a way to break it.
BeReal’s eventual decline and acquisition by Voodoo in 2024 didn’t surprise me. From 15 million daily users to 6 million in just a month, it followed the familiar rhythm of once-promising apps. The failure wasn’t BeReal’s fault. The app brilliantly created an innovative social space, but we carried our envy into it. Academic, financial, and social comparisons already trigger our envy; social media simply gives it more fuel. Perhaps no platform can deliver true authenticity—freedom from envy—because envy itself is woven in our social norms.
I deleted BeReal recently, cutting ties with my random and increasingly annoying notifications. The ding of “⚠️Time to BeReal.⚠️” doesn’t light up many phones anymore, and that brief moment where we all pretended that we could escape comparison has faded into digital history.