Once again, we sit Megan Merino and Kevin Fullerton down in front of a contentious bit of current culture and ask them to write about it straight from the heart. Here they take on social-media app BeReal, which aims to capture the reality of users’ everyday lives, not the staged humblebragging so prevalent on its rivals. Does it succeed?

Megan

If we call social-media apps what they really are (addictive digital substances), then BeReal should be the drug they use to wean you off the really hardcore stuff. This relatively new kid on the social-media block asks you to capture one image every 24 hours (through your phone’s camera) at a standardised time. That then creates a feed of often mundane but at least honest pictures of the same random moment in your online community’s day.

Of course, people can bend the rules and retake the picture with better lighting, or wait an hour until they go to that fancy dinner to have something more flashy to capture. But every retake and minute of tardiness is logged by the app so your phoney actions are shared with the world. 

This is the antithesis of heavily curated grid posts and Facetuned stories designed to impress people you don’t care about. Instead, when used correctly it shows the sheer banality of life and, if my own archive of selfies is anything to go by, serves up a generous slice of humble pie. Spoiler alert: it turns out we all spend way more time in front of computer screens than on a beach in Bali. 

Kevin

Take in a long deep breath that bundles up your troubles. Now, slowly breathe out and release those worries, that tension, those fears for the future. You are finely ground sediment, moving without purpose. Breathe in and . . . TIME TO BE REAL. Such is the jarring experience of BeReal, a push notification vending machine which invades your thoughts like an infant screaming in your ears.

Documenting mundanity may be a reasonable antidote to the brag-’em-up mentality fostered by Instagram and their ilk, but why bother? The better option is to tune out completely, not change to a less irritating station. It’s like relocating your home from a sewage pipe to a public toilet: new location, same flood of excrement.

Either way, our lives aren’t interesting enough to share with the world in any context, beyond a handful of friends and family (and they’re not interested either). So, delete BeReal and stop polluting the world with endless visual representations of your drudging routine. While you bathe in comfortable silence, meditate on how good life could be if corporate tech giants stopped trying to capitalise on your every waking moment.