In October of 2021, the Los Angeles Times published a piece titled “Can posting a thirst trap on Instagram help you process grief after unspeakable loss?”
The writer opens the piece with the sentence “one of my best friends took her life in late August.” In the opening paragraph, she documents helping the family make funeral arrangements, creating a memorial website, and breaking the tragic news to friends. She talks about how, after the funeral, and after everyone started attempting to return to normal, she felt alone and consumed by grief.
She writes,
“Taking myself to the beach seemed the only thing that would alleviate my panic at this dissonant reality. The scale of the Pacific — and me, insignificant against its glittering blue vastness — oriented me toward this new sense of myself. One day, about two weeks after the funeral, I posted a photo of myself on Instagram wearing a triangle top string bikini, my body reflected in the full-length mirror in my living room. I captioned it: A grief trap.”
She then spends the rest of the pace both exploring and justifying her actions. “There was something deliciously deranged about it: a provocative photo of me wearing very little, on my way to the beach—the lowest-common-denominator genre of social media content—posted in the wake of my devastating grief, and the curious combination of sympathy and thirst below,” she writes.
I’m still entirely unsure how to feel about the piece. I give the writer credit for being self-aware and for putting her psyche on display in this way, and I have sympathy for what she’s going through. Still, while reading the piece, I couldn’t help but come back to the word “justify.” The writer was trying to justify her actions.
I’ve also never lost somebody close to me to suicide, but I know from friends who have that it’s a particular kind of grief I can’t begin to understand, and it wrecks your head in ways you can’t begin to explain. Additionally, this piece isn’t entirely parallel to what I’m here to figure out today. That said, it was the only first-person account that Google provided when I searched “What’s the psychology behind a disaster thirst trap?”
I’ve been wanting to write this piece for close to a year now, when, in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Helene, someone I knew—someone I was admittedly very friendly with for a period—posted a photo of themselves shirtless and glistening (and also admittedly, in great shape and ripped) from their garage home gym, and started said Instagram caption with—and I’m definitely paraphrasing here—”I don’t know if you all knew, but Hurricane Helen recently decimated where I live in Asheville,” and then went on to talk about how he was staying sane by concentrating on what he could control, like his home workouts, but the words really didn’t matter. The star was his six-pack. Or pecs. Or “smoldering” blue-steel stare, depending on what particularly tickles your fancy.
I was dumbfounded when I saw it. This person didn’t lose any property. They were temporarily out of work, but they had a place to stay and financial support. They didn’t lose anybody close to them and were never in any danger. In fact, their home had potable water restored months before I did. For all intents and purposes, this person was, like me, immensely privileged and not really personally affected.
That’s why I said there wasn’t a complete parallel between what I’d like to explore and the piece I opened this blog with. Because that writer experienced real loss and heartbreak—if I knew someone who’d lost their home or a friend, and their response was to take off their top and find some validation via an app or two, I’d probably give them a pass. But what boggles my mind is how anyone could have the lack of empathy—and lack of awareness—to use a legitimate disaster where people lost their lives, to try and showcase how hot they are.
West County Behavioral Health, a mental health center in Missouri, has an interesting blog titled The Emotional Undercurrents of Thirst Trap Postings. The social worker who wrote the piece said that while thirst traps are ostensibly intended to “attract attention or elicit desire,” beneath the surface, they’re more complex, with the added attention of:
- Seeking validation
- Boosting self-esteem
- Reclaiming agency
- Connecting and combating loneliness
- Masking fear and insecurity.
While this might be a big, fat “duh” from those of us who view social media behaviors through a cynical lens, it’s nice to hear it sometimes from an educated place, rather than just the judgment of one’s mind.
Because while I think it’s easy to say that these people aren’t capable of having anything they don’t make about themselves, I kind of feel like it’s deeper than that. Taking a sexy photo and tying it to an incident that destroyed lives is, to me, deeply unwell, and kind of a step further than just garden-variety self-centeredness (we will be avoiding all references to narcissism in this exploration because narcissism, along with gaslighting, is simply a term I don’t have the bandwidth to deal with anymore).
And I think there’s an added layer of this that it wasn’t just a random person nowhere near an epicenter who made a disaster about themselves, or using it to try and bandwagon onto what’s zeitgeisty in the Instagram algorithm. This was a person right here in Asheville, who was—I really hope—very aware of just how badly Helene altered some people’s lives; they lived within walking distance of real destruction. It’s sort of unfathomable to me—even though it’s really not—which is, I think, why I’m attempting to explore the psychological angle.
Meredith E. David and James A. Roberts published a study in the Canadian Journal of Behavioral Science titled Me, myself, and I: Self-centeredness, FOMO, and social media use, that theorizes that a lot of the more extreme-seeming—or…narcissistic (it’s unavoidable sometimes)—social media behaviors aren’t driven by self-centeredness or ego, but rather, by anxiety, and fear, and a deep, inherent loneliness, and keeping in mind how many people exhibit extreme self-centeredness on social media, this is really a quite tragic, unfortunate revelation.
Another very tragic, unfortunate revelation is that this makes me feel better about the state of the world (talk about making something about yourself, huh?). Although I cannot agree with, and certainly not condone, the Hurricane Helene thirst trap, I can at least empathize with the fact that there are people so deeply hurt and insecure that it almost untethers them from reality. The other option, the truly just self-absorbed, only-out-for-myself option, just feels, in today’s climate, a bit too…I don’t know if I want to go with scary or realistic, to fully accept as reality.
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