This is a pretty narrow Instagram experience. I follow my actual friends who post random things from their life, and then people from a few different hobbies.
Except for watch people, none of it is carefully curated 'look at me' experiences. Watch people are another stripe though.... $20k on the wrist, $200k steering wheel.
It has always been like that. The amount of energy, of pretending, we put into recreating past experiences through retelling, photo, movie, conversation... it almost always trumps the experience itself.
Facts don't matter. Only opinions, how we choose to see them and agree on its meaning as a group matters.
Photography has been a huge hobby for decades. Is the fact that it is so much more accessible now really mean that the entire basis is proving your experiences were amazing rather than experiencing them?
10 years ago, no one every would have accused someone who brings his DSLR onto a hike of "not experiencing" the hike. (Though you might have a point that it would have been pretty weird to have brought a camera to brunch just to get a great photo of your eggs benny)
A follower with a terminal illness wrote a heartfelt letter to a popular Instagram influencer that they followed and whose photos they enjoyed. When they passed away, the letter was sent on their behalf to the influencer.
When the influencer received the letter, they quickly skimmed through it, said “Cool” and tossed it in the trash with some other junk mail.
What should they have done? Reached out to the family of the anonymous follower? What does the "popular Instagram influencer" owe to someone who enjoys his/her photos?
Maybe no one sees anything wrong with it, and perhaps there is nothing wrong with it, hence the downvotes.
What's depressing though is not that people post pictures of a life you wish you had, they do it while not giving a shit about you, no matter how much you might admire them. If you have millions of followers, or maybe even a couple hundred thousand, then statistically a few die everyday, without even so much as a passing thought.
And yet we waste so much time looking at these people's content and letting it depress us, and not enough at those around us who matter more.