A 26-year-old woman racked up $10,000 of debt after trying to become an 'Instagram star' - and it reveals a huge issue with the platform

Mary Hanbury

Mar 8, 2018, 01:30 IST

A 26-year-old woman racked up $10,000 of debt after trying to become an 'Instagram star' - and it reveals a huge issue with the platform

Facebook/Lissette Calveiro

26-year-old Lissette Calveiro racked up $10,000 of debt trying to become an Instagram star.

Millennials are spending thousands of dollars on crafting shots made for Instagram.
This week, the New York Post reported the story of 26-year-old Lissette Calveiro, who racked up $10,000 of debt while trying to become an Instagram star.
Calveiro said that a lot of the travel she did "was strictly for Instagram."
This fake picture-perfect lifestyle isn't only crippling Instagram users financially - it's creating mental-health issues among other users.

Some millennials are sinking thousands of dollars into crafting perfect Instagram photos.

This week, the New York Post reported the story of 26-year-old Lissette Calveiro, who racked up $10,000 of debt trying to become an Instagram star.

Calvario splurged on designer handbags, expensive clothes, and luxurious vacations while working low-salary jobs, including an internship in New York.

"I was shopping ... for clothes to take 'the perfect 'gram,'" she told the New York Post. "I was living above my means. I was living a lie and debt was looming over my head."

Calveiro said that a lot of the travel she did "was strictly for Instagram."

Instagram has created a generation of consumers who are obsessed with making their lives look perfect and are spending thousands of dollars to do so.

For some, this leads to big payoffs - successful influencers can earn thousands of dollars on each post and can be even more influential than traditional celebrities.

Famous Instagram-posting and travel-blogging duo Lauren Bullen and Jack Morris are an example of this. The 24- and 26-year-olds make a six-figure salary traveling the world together. In a recent interview with Cosmopolitan, Morris said he wouldn't post for less than $3,000 from a sponsor.

But for those who don't make it, the lifestyle can be financially crippling.

"Nobody talks about [his or her] finances on Instagram," Calveiro told the Post. "It worries me how much I see girls care about image. I had a lot of opportunities to save. I could've invested that money in something."

Wider repercussions

The quest for that picture-perfect lifestyle isn't only pushing Instagram users into debt - it's also causing some broader cultural issues.

A recent study done by the UK-based Royal Society for Public Health named Instagram the worst social media app for mental health. The survey of almost 1,500 Britons aged 14 to 24 found that young people were most likely to associate Instagram with negative mental well-being and feelings of inadequacy and anxiety.

"Social media has been described as more addictive than cigarettes and alcohol and is now so entrenched in the lives of young people that it is no longer possible to ignore it when talking about young people's mental health issues," Shirley Cramer, CEO of RSPH, said in a post on the organization's findings.

But Instagram isn't the only thing to blame, as the obsession with image dates back to before the app exploded in popularity.

A study published by the American Psychological Association, which looked at nine million young adults between the years 1966 and 2009, found that millennials cared much more about money and image than previous generations.

"The proportion of students who said being wealthy was very important to them increased from 45% for baby boomers (surveyed between 1966 and 1978) to 70% for Generation Xers (surveyed between 1979 and 1999) and 75% for millennials (surveyed between 2000 and 2009)," the study said.