How obsessed with Instagram are we really?

It’s been only 20 minutes, but somehow you just woke up from a blackout staring at a picture of your best friend’s college roommate’s brother’s mother’s trip to Aruba last spring. How did you get here? Where did the time go? And why can’t you stop going deeper and deeper?

You, my friends, have entered the great depths of Instagram. Instagram is the app that’s on it’s way to save the world. OK, maybe it’s just making the world a little better, but we’re still obsessed.

The most Instagrammable sky EVER

Being Instagram famous is the norm nowadays, with your average girl having a whopping 20k follower count and being paid to post a pic of herself with some herbal tea to “promote” it. How has this happened? Has Instagram really taken over our lives? We conducted a survey to see how much Instagram actually takes our day to day lives, and if we’re all really as obsessed as it seems.

Just trying to get a good insta

Our survey was mostly made up of 19, 20 and 21 year old women. In total, 182 women took the survey. The vast majority of these participants were either on Instagram a few times a day or once at least every two hours, so it’s safe to say that our survey takers are on the app pretty often. But how much do we actually care about our pics and our profiles?

Of the people surveyed, 45 percent said they only take one minute to edit their Instagrams, but I’m calling bullshit on that. No way picking the perfect filter and going through all the settings takes 60 seconds, unless you’re an insta-wizard and to that I salute you. The next largest time period it took to edit an Instagram was about 10 minutes, which is a bit more realistic.

The perfect brunch insta, taken by yours truly

Instagram isn’t the only place we can edit our pictures, though. Among those surveyed, 46 percent said they used other apps to edit their pictures before posting them. Some of the most popular editing apps mentioned were VSCO cam, Afterlight, Whitagram and Instasize.

The next important thing to an insta pic besides editing it is, of course, the caption. It takes 46 percent of us a few minutes to think of a caption, and most of us (55.7 percent) believe that the caption we choose is somewhat important.

While pictures are the main part to Instagram, it seems that most young females really care about their follower count and that “ratio” (your followers:following count). Our survey said that the average Instagrammer has about 600 to 700 followers and that they follow an average  of 500 profiles. When asked if they intentionally kept their following count lower than their follower count, 74 percent surveyed said no, but 42 percent believe that the number of followers they have is important.

This survey is proof that we’re all not as obsessed with Instagram as it really seems, and that a TON of you only take a few minutes to edit your pics and think of a caption. Please teach me your ways.