It’s time you asked yourself: Are you an isobragger?

While most families in lockdown are eating mac ‘n cheese in stained dressing gowns and screaming about who’s using all the wi-fi, the other half are keen to show us how they’re nailing it. And us normal people have had enough, writes Susie O’Brien.

Isobraggers need to get back to eating mac ‘n cheese in their stained dressing gowns like the rest of us, writes Susie O’Brien.

Isobrag. Noun. The art of appearing to care about others while promoting your own talents and achievements in isolation.

While most families in lockdown are reduced to eating mac ‘n cheese in stained dressing gowns and screaming about who’s using all the wi-fi, the other half are keen to show us how they’re nailing it.

In immaculate, light-filled houses they’re rediscovering the joy of family togetherness one 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle at a time.

Their tables are groaning under the weight of healthy food cooked by the kids, their evenings are spent playing board games by the fire and they spend their free time sewing masks for the local hospital.

Their couches are full of adoring, languid pets, their yoga sessions are “heavenly” and their pumpkin and pepita seed scones are a hit with all the elderly people in the street.

“Just doing what we can,” they caption their photos of their kids delivering the scones in rattan baskets looking like a cross between Florence Nightingale and Martha Stewart before she went to jail.

Everyone knows about their selfless sacrifice but no one knows that the scones are hard as rocks and full of last night’s leftovers scrapped off plates.

And when they’ve done their bit to spread light, love, peace and joy throughout their neighbourhood, they decamp to their holiday houses to selflessly isolate with thousands of others on Sorrento’s front beach.

Ask yourself: are you an isobragger?

If your social media feed is full of photos of the doughnuts you’ve baked from scratch during a break from homeschooling?

Have you posted videos of your kitchen table art classes?

Your loved-up candlelit dinners?

Your $110 takeaway box from a three-star restaurant that came with 13 pouches, instructions on plating up and a curated Spotify playlist?

I, for one, have had enough of it.

I am more excited about the return of the Polly Waffle than your sourdough starter, your family exercise classes or your virtual dawn mediation sessions.

No, I don’t need to see your slow-cooked beef ragout made from eye fillet that cost more than my car.

Please bear in mind that last night I paid $130 for UberEats Chinese that was delivered 45 minutes late by a man called Ramon in a Hyundai Getz.

The last time I cooked a new dish it was mushroom pasta that ended up with a slightly radioactive grey tinge and a sauce that looked like the contents of my vacuum cleaner.

Please also stop posting photos of your amazing isobrag birthday cakes. Two of the kids from my house had birthdays in April, and all they got were cardboard piñatas that arrived two weeks late from Kmart.

A bid to conquer the famous Woman’s Weekly pool cake failed when we made it with chocolate icing that turned khaki instead of pale green and purple jelly water.

These days, toilet paper is plentiful, but you can’t buy blue jelly crystals anywhere.

Even worse are the pious celebrity isobraggers who think we need them to tell us how lucky we are while their posts show us how lucky they are.

Actor Ryan Reynolds tells us that: “COVID-19 has brutally impacted older adults and low income families”.

He’s forgetting that COVID-19 has brutally impacted adults who have to be preached at by self-satisfied celebrities telling us how amazing they feel to be thinking about others for a change.

I am too busy wiping coffee off the walls thanks to my teenage daughter’s experiments with whipped espressos to care that Lizzo can twerk and play a flute at the same time.

And I don’t care that actor Naomi Watts is cooking for the homeless and has shared her dahl recipes.

“Cooking is one of my favourite things to do and all the better when there’s a pot to share!” she wrote.

Well, eating is one of my favourite things to do and all the better when the recipe doesn’t involve veggo food that looks like it’s been eaten once already.

I don’t need wealthy celebrities in their multimillion-dollar mansions reminding me that “money isn’t everything” and that “the little things in life have meaning again”.

There are a few little things that matter in my life right now, like finding the missing TV remote control, learning how to make cakes that don’t scare young children and getting my hands on a Polly Waffle.

Give me that over isobragging any day.

[e-mail]

@susieob

READ MORE:

HOW WE CAN ALL LEARN LESSONS FROM LOCKDOWN

WHY I’LL STILL TAKE MY TEEN DRIVING DURING LOCKDOWN

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