Mr Dan Rookwood and Mr Will Storr present the case for and against taking pictures of ourselves and posting them online.

Today, on National Selfie Day, take a scroll through social media. Chances are it won’t be long before you come across a photograph of somebody that they have taken themselves. Selfies are everywhere. “Selfie” has now been part of the world’s vocabulary since at least 2013, when it was named word of the year by Oxford Dictionaries. The trend was around before then, when moody kids with big hair on MySpace would snap pictures of themselves in the mirror (with flash, of course). Before we knew it, even animals were self-snapping. A selfie that a monkey took in 2011 sparked a legal case to determine whether the photographer or the primate owned the copyright. (The court eventually decided that macaques cannot legally hold copyrights.)

But what about nowadays, for the average human? Is there really any shame in taking the odd selfie? What do they tell us about ourselves? Innocent self-documentation or rampant narcissism? To try and answer these questions, we asked serial selfie-taker and former MR PORTER US editor Mr Dan Rookwood to come to their defence (and give us a few tips on how to do them properly) and Mr Will Storr, journalist and author of Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed And What It’s Doing To Us, to explain his position against them. Whomever you side with, it’ll provide some food for thought think next time you open the front-facing camera.

National Selfie Day tends to divide opinion. There are those who will roll their eyes at such a ridiculous made-up calendar date, believing selfies to be a vulgar and narcissistic metaphor for everything that is wrong with the world today. At the other extreme, there are the vulgar narcissists for whom every day is selfie day. Most of us fall somewhere between the two.

When the editors of The MR PORTER Daily were looking for someone to defend the selfie-obsessed, I take no pride in the realisation that mine was the first name that sprang to mind. (Cue forlorn face.) It doesn’t reflect well. And yet a cursory scroll through my Instagram feed does indeed betray that I have a weakness for them, particularly a celebrity selfie.

Should men take selfies? Probably not, but many of us do. We’re all a bit vain. How many of us can resist checking ourselves out when we pass a mirror, or indeed anything vaguely reflective (a shop window, a car window, any kind of window)? Most of us take selfies. It’s about whether or not we post them on social media in a craven bid for the approval of complete strangers.

If you’re going to do it, and let’s face it you probably are, then have some selfie-awareness. Here are a few safeguards to adhere to, lest you become insufferable.

Everything in moderation. If your feed is predominantly pictures of you taken by you, think how that looks. (Here’s a hint: it looks like you really love yourself.) As a rule of thumb, let’s say no more than one or two selfies in every 10 pictures you post, OK?

Keep it real. Part of the point of selfies is that they allow you to capture your best angle. Fine, but beware of heavy pouting. And those apps that allow you to Photoshop your face? Fake news. Some subtle use of filters is all that is permissible.

Try not to brag. Are you on a private jet? Are you posing alongside a methuselah of champagne with a firework shooting out of it? Are you showing off your six-pack? Such selfies carry a very high douche risk. You know this. Ask yourself: do I look too smug/self-congratulatory here? If the answer is yes, don’t do it.

Employ deft deflection. Instead of a shameless torso shot on the beach, pose with a cute kid/dog. The focus of the picture is the kid/dog. If people also happen to notice your rippling abs, well, that’s just a coincidence. Or sneak a selfie through by saying something like, “Thank you, [name of friend], for my new shirt.”

Use self-deprecation. A fairly gratuitous selfie can often be forgiven when accompanied by an amusing caption and/or hashtag, especially one that pokes fun at yourself, eg #canyoutellimtensing. Also post the occasional unflattering shot of yourself with bad hair or looking half asleep. That’ll help balance things out.

Think ahead. When deciding whether or not to post that selfie, imagine that your boss or your future boss is going to see this picture and judge you for it. Because guess what? They probably will.

Selfies make you unhappy. One of the fundamental ways your brain works out how well you’re doing is by comparing yourself to people around you. You really do hate it when your friends become successful. Humans evolved to live in tribes of about 150 people, but today we’re comparing ourselves to the entire world. When we take a photo of ourselves and our perfectly lit hyper-local craft granola and put it on Instagram, it becomes part of an endless stream competing selfies, at least half of which will be of better-looking people eating superior granola.

You can tell yourself you’re not in competition with the Beckhams or the Kardashians or your wife’s friend’s better-looking husband. You can tell yourself it’s about “connection” and “sharing” and “celebration”. It’s not. Not to your subconscious anyway. It’s about status. All humans are obsessed with their relative status. It’s one of those wired-in fundamentals. And on social media, it’s a game you’re going to lose.

This is probably why Instagram has been found to be the social media platform that’s most dangerous to mental health. People upload their finest moments in order to grab as much drive-by sycophancy as they can from their followers. Psychologists call this perfectionistic self-presentation and the insidious thing about it is that it doesn’t matter that you know it’s what everyone’s doing. Unconsciously, your brain’s still measuring your relative status against them. And more often than not, it concludes that you’ve come up short. This makes you feel like a failure, increases perfectionistic thinking, and that way lies a grim buffet of mental illnesses. Eating disorders, steroid use and self-harm have all been on the rise since the birth of social media.

I never put selfies online. Instead, I upload pictures I hope have some photographic merit. I try not to follow selfie-type accounts. I follow professional photographers instead. More often than not, selfies make me feel shit.

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