You won’t ever be Instagram verified, so don’t bother trying

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It appears the promised land of Instagram verification has finally jumped from a pale fantasy of thirsty faux influencers barfing out cash on the Instagram verification black market to a viable, albeit wholly superficial, reality.

Starting today, Instagram users can apply for verification as it rolls out an option to request verification. Simply go into your profile settings and fill out a simple form with your account name, full name and a picture of your legal ID along with a full bucket of broken dreams, hopes and the disillusion that you are someone worthy of verification. The thirst trap has opened its hideous jaws to the unwashed and unverified masses, Instagram users with little to offer besides gym selfies and blurry concert pictures.

Instagram verification, to this point, has been regulated to the true influencers, the perfectly quaffed persons with massive followings drooling at the professionally shot and edited reality they appear to exist within. These people deserve to be Instagram verified, as many accounts pop up trying to imitate or leech off their success with clone accounts. However, this doesn’t mean that Instagram has to be yet another exclusive club that won’t even let you rifle through the trash.

With this move, Instagram is sending a message to the rest of us that the visual representations of our lives, filtered and surreal, are just as valid as that of the beautiful people swimming near the surface. Now is our time to grab them by the ankles and pull them into the murky depths of Instagram, with our inability to apply the right filters, use adequate lighting and not have hideously disgusting children that are about as photogenic as an account that is nothing but pictures of cat anuses.

After a certain amount of time after submitting your verification request, Instagram will notify you if you’ve been approved or most likely, rejected. Let me save you some time, you with your three hundred followers and inability to move past posting pictures of your meals — you will never be Instagram verified. That means you, Dave. While most of you refuse to believe that, deep down in your heart of social media hearts, you know it to be true. Even if you are verified on Twitter, that holds no weight in the world of Facebook or Instagram verification.

Your dreams of Instagram verification are akin to waking up after a wet dream and sliding into your parents’ room and asking them if you just had sex. Sure, you can click the request verification button when it finally appears in-app, but that tiny part of you screaming that this will be a futile endeavor only ending in more eternal sadness you are unable to compartmentalize might be right. This might be a case where the overwhelming weight of social media anxiety might best be lifted by not bothering to try.

Yet, you are going to try anyway. Hell, I’ve opened and closed Instagram at least a dozen times already. Because what is social media if not a reason to destroy our already fragile public egos with another arbitrary rejection of our actual lives?

Will you submit a request to be Instagram verified? Let us know in the comments below.

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