How to be a hardcore Instagrammer

Have you ever wanted to feel like you have some semblance of control over your life? Well, in using this article to teach yourself on how to be a hardcore Instagrammer, you'll finally be able to delude yourself into thinking you're doing something with your time. Let's get started, shall we?

First comes the bio in your profile. The trick is this: it must only be a few words. Writing it is one of the most difficult tasks I know, so here are a few common templates for you to follow:

1.            Putting a quote/idiom/song lyric that is unrelated to anything you will ever post

2.            Writing a reference that no one will (care to) understand

3.            Inspirational writing that definitely won't be the leading cause of trauma among your followers

4.            Leaving links to your other social media profiles to display how famous you are

5.            Stating your zodiac sign, because more people should be aware that impossibly distant, enormous spheres of perpetually exploding gas truly affect your life

6.            Adding emoji flags of all the countries you've visited to show how many other visas you've been denied

Good news though, attractiveness doesn't equate to accuracy. Don't worry about whether anyone will laugh if you write something like "Filled with wanderlust" or "A traveller at heart", despite having a feed that's basically photos of a stay-home Neanderthal with a VGA camera.

Having finished up your ahead-of-the-game bio for the truly entitled snowflake, it's time to move on to your feed. Your bio might get you followers, but the feed makes them stay. Your feed must be filled with over-filtered, beautiful shots of random objects that you'll see in your everyday life, most of which you'll find in within a 2 metre radius from your bed.

However, how can a feed be YOUR feed without showcasing three or four nearly identical selfies? Get that share button out, slap on some filters and upload that face! Before you do though, note that a real Instagrammer always has two accounts: a public one, and a private one. This allows for two feeds to annoy everyone with, as well as two bios to maximise brain damage in others. The public account should hold your #aesthetic feed and some of your public selfies. The other account will have only selfies and candids.

After setting up both accounts, always make sure to advertise the other account on each account's bio. Assuming you don't look like Jabba the Hutt, this should get you a massive influx of followers on both ends. On your public account, this is okay. Attract more people by leaving something like "follow for follow" or "like for like" in your bio; maximise your societal cringe level. However, this cannot be done on your private account. In fact, never follow anyone back on your private account unless they're hot. Even if you're not.

Is this all there is? Well, now that every social media has pretty much plagiarised off Snapchat, you have one last thing to take care of: Instagram stories. This is the final staple, and the most difficult to maintain in the long run. A good Instagram story will consist of at least twenty filtered selfies on it per day, as well as #aesthetic pictures of more random objects and the scenery (silhouettes and a dim lighting help in this regard). People with a higher level of dedication also tend to vlog their entire day by the hour if possible. This is because until you have done so, your plane of reality doesn't exist, and neither does the food you eat. Remember: a true Instagrammer is W O K E, above all things, and this is most evident through your stories.

Stories also help in practicing on how to be a celebrity with its "Live" feature. Sure, you might be getting 30 views, but that's like, wayyy more than the number of friends you have. Who cares about actual friends, amirite? You're plenty famous, as seen by the number of people who comment on and like your posts, and no one can take that away from you, apart from the lack of WiFi during load-shedding. Speaking of friends, you can collaborate with them on your stories too, as it assists in advertising each other.

These are some of the main ingredients in achieving your Instagram dreams. There are other small tips, such as combining common templates for your bio and only writing in typos (with lots of "…." between words), captioning using only hashtags for words, advertising each new post of your private account on your stories to entice more hot people to follow, etc.

However, regardless of all my tips, practice teaches better than theory. So go, young grasshopper -- a world of narcissism awaits you.