The Sunset Insta Stories Phenomenon

Apparently I was so absorbed in my TLC reality TV binge that I missed the sunset of the century. Despite sitting next to a giant window, my apartment faces away from the heart of the sunset, so I rarely catch them anymore when I’m in LA. I never would’ve known about how spectacular it was tonight if it wasn’t for Instagram.

You know there was a good sunset when you open the app and start clicking through stories and everyone in your city is posting photos of the sky. From campus to Pasadena to Malibu to the football stadium, I’ve now seen this neon pink show from a dozen different perspectives. I thoroughly feel like I missed out.

This is a phenomenon I first took note of this summer, where I do have a great view of the spectacular mountain sunsets from my childhood bedroom. One evening, I was totally absorbed in the layers of pinks and oranges and purples in the sky, and I decided to make the very basic post to stories about it. Everyone needs to see how gorgeous this is, right? Since I was on Instagram anyway, I clicked on a few of the newly updated stories and started laughing that right around the same time I uploaded all of my coworkers had posted the same sunset from various points of view. For a moment, everyone in the town paused and looked up.

While some people look for connection in the North Star, there’s something to be said for a particularly dazzling sunset that gets everyone posting in tandem, proving we’re all connected. This goofy little phenomenon has been floating around my head since June, and I was curious why it stuck with me so much.

It is exceedingly rare that everyone mutually agrees about something on the Internet, and beyond that, it’s especially poignant that we’re uniting around a sense of wonder at the beauty of nature. There’s some kind of sunset every night, but the post worthy ones seem to come about through an unspoken agreement that this particular sunset has exceeded that of all the normal ones. You rarely see just one person posting the pink clouds. It’s a reminder of our capacity for wonder, both in ourselves and just innately as humans, to take a second of being enveloped in a pure and unexpected awe, and it’s what makes both the sunsets themselves and the cascade of photos afterwards create a glow in my heart.