People don’t want to be the cause of other people feeling left out of a birthday or a dinner. “Or if someone’s smoking a cigarette—they’re a mum, and they have a cheeky cigarette once every six months—and they’re caught in the background of someone’s Instagram video and they get absolutely slammed…. Or they just don’t want their baby shower plastered over 15 different Instagrams. They just don’t want that anymore. And this is becoming much more of a thing in this area, actually, and I find it quite nice. It’s quite refreshing.”

On the flip side, she has noticed that when you log off Instagram, your invites can really take a hit. “A lot of stuff in this town is like, ‘Let’s do something at The Farm!’ So-and-so is there giving out free somethings, all your girlfriends are going…. The thing is, there isn’t anywhere else to go. There are, like, three places. It’s just a small town on the east coast of Australia. You’ve been here. There’s not a lot going on.”

Back in Los Angeles, I called Imogen Edwards. Recently, Edwards split from her partner. They sold the house in France and returned to Byron.

“It was really just a bit of a fantasy game where you’re like, ‘Wow, could we do this!’ ” she says of the move to France. “I didn’t think it through too much. Kind of more, ‘Let’s have life experiences! We can do this! How lucky are we to be able to do this?’ ”

I remark that it’s funny how she left one fantasy life to live another, similar fantasy life.

“You don’t understand the level of people messaging me, basically shouting at me, going, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ Like French chicks—going, like, ‘I follow you all because I want your life!’ ”

On her return, Edwards says she was very honest with her “raw feelings” about the experience of moving to not just another country, but the idea of another country. “And that’s the reality,” she says. “Everything looks beautiful, but something was missing for me.”

It occurred to her that everyone is striving for this perfect life, posting perfect pictures, feeling the pressure to say that everything’s perfect. “And I’m like, I don’t want to have to say it’s perfect. I don’t want people to feel like I’m living a perfect life, because I’m far from it. You know? No one knows the internal battles and the ups and downs—I’m just sick of kind of putting that out.”

“Mum Instagramming,” she says, can lead to real connections and alleviate the isolation of being a new mother. “It can make you feel like someone’s got your back,” she says. Like, “ ‘Oh, I’m not alone!’ ” But it enables a false intimacy, too, and a lack of accountability. You can delete someone. You can disappear. The community is a shared illusion that’s real, until it’s not.

Speaking of France, I ask if she’s heard that children there will now be allowed to sue their parents for posting pictures of them on social media as children.

“One day, I guess the kids are going to be like, ‘Mum, why did you post that picture of me? I look ugly!’ You’ll get this backlash from your kids….You don’t know until they’re grown up, and they turn around at you, and they’re like, ‘Bloody hell, Mum! I can’t believe you did that!’ Whereas another kid might go to their mum and say, ‘Thanks for doing that, Mum! I’m a supermodel now! I never had to work for a place because you made this platform for me!’ ”

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