I refused to download BeReal for months.
In-person interaction has always held the highest appeal for me. I’m usually several months (or more) behind the social media trends and have frequently deleted my accounts for days or weeks at a time at random. While the aesthetic and creative outlet that social media allows draws me in, the tendency to create a filtered and heavily curated “highlight reel” pushes me away. Have I done that? Sure. But the core of my presence on social media is a desire to see what is really happening in the lives of people I care about, whether or not it is considered “Instagram worthy.”
BeReal, as a concept, goes against that grain. I didn’t realize that for a while, mainly because the only exposure I had to BeReal was seeing people post those photos to their other social media, which confused me. Weren’t BeReal’s supposed to… stay on BeReal?
If you’re unfamiliar with the app, here’s the general concept: all BeReal users get a notification at a random time during the day. You don’t know when it will happen and everyone gets it at the same time. When the notification goes off, you have two minutes to take your BeReal — one photo on the back camera, and one photo on the front camera. Anything posted after that is considered “late.” Once you’ve posted your BeReal, you can see your friends’ posts and “react” to them, but if you don’t post, you cannot see the daily BeReals. Sounds complicated, I know, but it’s really not.
When I finally downloaded BeReal, I was sitting in my friend’s living room a couple of weeks after school started this semester. Once you get the app, it lets you take a BeReal regardless of the time to get some “practice” (which I found funny). I took a photo of the other girls there, then awkwardly kept holding my phone up, expecting a countdown before the photo of myself was taken. There was no countdown, so instead I got a very close up, blurry, concentration-face selfie which immediately sent us into tears of laughter and got me hooked on the app. This was exactly what I wanted out of my social media use.
Yesterday I walked from class toward the dining hall with some friends, and after we ordered our food we sat down and started talking about BeReal. Did we actually like it? Or had it just become a cultural peer pressure thing? How did it affect our perception of ourselves and our environment?
Anna Swindell, sophomore communications major, had a similar initial reaction to BeReal to my own.
“When it first came out I was like, ‘this is annoying,’ but I hopped on the trend,” Swindell said, and made a face as she said this and we all laughed because, well, relatable.
Rivers Abshere, sophomore psychology major, tells the story of when she first got the app.
“I got on because Anna and Rachel [their other roommate] had it… they were like ‘oh my gosh, look at this app! Have you heard of BeReal?’” Abshere said, and we laughed again as she mimicked their voices.
“We were at a baseball game,” Abshere remembered. “I downloaded it, I was like ‘oh this will be so fun!’ …I had like five friends on it, and it’s just fun to go back and look and see what I was doing.”
Swindell agrees and continues on about why she likes BeReal.
“People definitely pose and post late if they want to sometimes, but so many times I see people just taking a nap,” Swindell said. “And I actually like that a lot because it makes me realize like, okay, people chill in their dorm room by themselves too, like, I’m not the only one who sometimes isn’t doing anything.”
This comment highlights a big reason why I think BeReal is so appealing. As a generation that’s grown up with Snapchat filters and curated Instagram photo dumps, an app that encourages people to share their naptime, solo lunch break or afternoon walk with their roommate is refreshing. However, there can be downfalls to an app like this, which Swindell also brings up.
“It does say something about our society and how technology is so invasive… like the fact that a notification can go off and all of a sudden everyone’s like ‘oh my gosh, it’s time to BeReal!’ It says something about how, like, our brains are trained to react to notifications…,” Swindell said. “I think as it goes on, I wonder if it’s gonna become less and less real, you know?”
While it’s hard to tell what the future of BeReal will be, there is no denying that the notification can be a chokehold for some people in its current state. So many other questions can be asked because of this: if you don’t take it seriously, are you actually “being real?” But on the flip side, if you’re glued to your phone with fingers crossed that it goes off while you’re doing something “cool,” are you actually “being real” then? What is “being real,” actually?
I think that being real looks different for everyone. For some people, maybe the app is a little too much of an obsession. But for others, maybe it’s just the breath of fresh air that they need in an increasingly digital and filtered world.
Our conversation continued on. After an observation about how many people intentionally keep their circle of friends on BeReal small, Abshere brought up another point to consider.
“It is fun to see people though that, like, you don’t talk to on a regular basis living their regular life. I have friends that I played soccer with in California and they’re at UCLA, so it’s a totally different lifestyle and they’re just being real doing whatever they’re doing…,” Abshere said. “And that’s fun, because you catch up with those people sometimes but you don’t see what they’re doing on a daily basis.”
“It’s not like Instagram where it’s just a highlight reel,” Swindell agreed. “It’s hard to curate and I do like it better for those reasons.”
While there’s a lot to unpack surrounding the concept of BeReal, a general consensus seems to be the same: People enjoy the lack of filters and curation and have fun seeing what their friends are up to, especially if it’s people they don’t get to catch up with often.
Ironically enough, as Abshere, Swindell and myself were wrapping up the conversation, the BeReal notification for the day went off. We all started laughing and then took turns taking our BeReals with one another. Swindell’s french fries were too hot, so now there’s a few photos out there with her making a funny face and Abshere and I laughing about it.
That made me realize another reason why I like BeReal: for me, it doesn’t take away from in-person interaction, it adds to it. After thirty seconds of having fun taking the photos, we were right back to our conversation and enjoying time together instead of getting sucked into a constant scroll. BeReal really can help you do better at being real — if you let it.
