SYDNEY, Nov 4 — A quick scroll through Australian model Essena O'Neill's Instagram feed, and you’ll see why the 18-year-old amassed a following of nearly 700,000 followers.

Her account, which appears to have been taken down at time of writing, gave mere mortals a serious case of FOMO.

A rocking beach bod, yoga poses, inspirational quotes, baby tigers — they were all there.

But on Saturday, O'Neill suddenly announced what so many of us already know: Social media is a charade, and it encourages its users to compare themselves to others’ manufactured personas.

“Social media is not real life”, she said. “I don’t want to promote greedy industries or photoshop or fake art.”

And so, after 173 weeks on Instagram, O'Neill completely changed her online presence and decided to speak up about the complexities of those platforms built around likes and followers.

To kick-off her crusade, O'Neill not only deleted a large number of Instagram photos, but also recaptioned her remaining posts with detailed accounts of how she really felt that day.

Her re-edited captions point to a lonely world full of pressure and isolation, with beauty and fame the only aspiration.

She described the world that she was living in as “2D” and says it made her “incredibly insecure”.

On one swimsuit shot from 77 weeks ago, she added: “Took over 100 in similar poses trying to make my stomach look good. Would have hardly eaten that day.”

O'Neill also came clean about the clothes she’s worn in her photos.

She warns that if a so-called “Instagram girl” tags a brand, “99 percent of the time” she's getting compensated for doing so.

“Was paid A$400 (RM1,230) to post a dress," she captioned about a tight, striped item, worn while drinking out of a mason jar.

“That's when I had maybe 150k followers. With half a million followers, I know of many online brands (with big budgets) that pay up to US$2,000 per post. Nothing is wrong with accepting brand deals. I just think it should be known.”

O’Neill, who said her paid endorsements made her feel “extremely shallow, greedy and lost”, has launched a new site called Let’s Be Game Changers.

Through each piece of content she churns out, her message is clear: “There is nothing cool about spending all your time taking edited pictures of yourself to prove to the world, ‘You are enough,’” which she wrote on her site on Monday.

O’Neill also posted this tearful video, explaining further why she quit what she describes as her “dream life”.