Browsing for Happiness: How Instagram Culture is Making Us Unwell

You can now LISTEN to this piece if you prefer. Just search “Rewilding with Taylor Gage” in your podcast player of choice.

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“Here, Now” reads the tattoo on my left arm — the words blurred to a formless line in my peripherals as my gaze is fixed to the screen. Scrolling, scrolling. Scrolling past infographics and hot takes on current events, past droves of dancing and pointing small business owners, through ads disguised as posts and vice versa, through memes and comment sections filled with praise and scorn in equal measure… through the perpetual flood of content made available from colleagues, friends, industry leaders, and everyone in between, on Instagram.

“What am I doing?” I would sometimes snap to, immediately aware that I had been miles from here and now, instead entirely absorbed in a screen when I didn’t want to be at all. I’d shudder as I tossed the phone down, only to be sucked back in a few hours (or sometimes minutes) later.

What are we doing? We are shoveling over the most valuable resource we possess as humans — our attention — to a singular business (a singular human, no less), and no matter how often we toss our phones down in brief moments of self aware horror, we nevertheless find ourselves pulled back in once again.

This relationship we have to our phones in general and social media in particular is more than just an attentional hijacking— we are being thoroughly altered, mind, body and soul. The impact of this dynamic is one that I believe is costing us more than we realize: our health, our happiness, and our ability to maneuver through our own lives and communities with compassion, acceptance, and presence.

Instagram has subtly infected and captured our emotional and cognitive circuits in a way that’s not only harming us collectively (as we all can clearly see when we glance at the news or the current sociopolitical landscape), but ourselves. These apps have warped how we view ourselves and others, and have defined the very goals and meaning that we attempt to ascribe to our own lives.

How we wield our attention either puts us further asleep and set into feedback loops of unsatisfactoriness — never being quite there, never having or being quite enough — or it awakens us to the infinite enoughness of this moment, right now. These are topics I know intimately and deeply. As a mindfulness coach who studies and re-aligns human behavior and helps forge access to true, internal peace and contentment for my clients, I see up close just how apps like Instagram are keeping us away from here and now: ironically, everything that we want most. 

Whether you are a content creator with 100k Instagram followers or an occasional scroller with 100 followers, the layers to this disruption (corruption?) are insidious and interact with each other in a multitude of ways, and I will do my best to cover all of the factors involved here, as I see them anyway.

THE SEDUCTION: Information, Entertainment, Connection

What is it about social media that has us tied to our phones, even (especially) when we don’t even want to be at all? For the most part, we can all easily recognize the innocuous appeal.

Being able to anonymously peer into everyone else’s life at the tap of a button is a remarkable modern feature. We can see what our cousins and college friends are up to on the other side of the country or world, we can stay in the loop with important causes and news, we can broadcast our views or services for free to whoever will listen.

It’s everything we ever wanted: we have the entire library of the history of human knowledge, wisdom, and entertainment in one place in our pocket, 24/7. Everyone has the ability to share their voice and be heard, and can gain audiences and followings with relative ease. Isolated underwater basket weavers now have access to their people, allowing for connection and community in a way we’ve never seen before. All for free.

Information, connection, and entertainment (or, the facade of each) live at the heart of our Instagram and social media obsession, and tends to be what keeps us coming back for more. 

We want to know and learn more, we want to be and stay connected to those we love or admire, and we all certainly love a good laugh and to be transported away from the relentless stress and burden of being a human alive today, if even for a moment.

But are we really getting what we think we are? And is it really “free”, or are we paying a hidden price?

INFORMATION: Industrialized Content Farms 

Consumption Culture 

In the 1990s, two researchers, Peter Pirolli and Stuart Card, developed a theory on how people navigate the internet called Information Foraging Theory. This examination of behavior likened our evaluation, decision making, and overall use of the endless stream of information to animals foraging for food, and defines a ratio that many of us are unknowingly adhering to as we browse the web: we are attempting to maximize our rate of (information) gain to get as much relevant information in as little time as possible. 

Whether we stay in one “information patch” or jump to the next one relies on this underlying consideration. Will the cost of going to a new resource bring a satisfactory return? Should we stay here and commit to this article or moment, or hit next?

It doesn’t take much self reflection to grasp what our choice — our longing, our craving — nearly always is: next.

The philosopher Alan Watts framed this yearning for next as a product of the structure of modern Western life that most of us are beholden to as children to adults, into old age. “You will never be able to sit back with full contentment and say, ‘now, I’ve arrived!’ Your entire education has deprived you of this capacity because it was preparing you for the future, instead of showing you how to live now.”

All of our precious present moments are spent hurriedly preparing for tomorrow, the weekend, vacation, a return to normal, our future, next. And while we’re waiting for next to arrive, our gaze fixed above here and now, eagerly scanning the distance for something better, we have to find some way to endure this moment: the boring, inconvenient now.

So how do we seek happiness while we wait? For many of us, we look to the scripture of the American Dream, busying ourselves with various forms of consumption: buying, collecting, and adorning ourselves with as much stuff as we can. When we look closely, we know this is an empty promise — and yet we still find ourselves seduced by the allure of the new house, the new relationship, the new car, the new clothing. Because everywhere we look, the message is clear: consumption is the medicine to our perpetual dissatisfaction and will keep us happy (or at least, distracted) until the next thing finally arrives. 

And when it comes to information in particular, its especially easy to see why this pull for next seems to override committing to a piece of content: there is just SO MUCH available to explore. And when viewed through the lens of Information Foraging Theory, it makes sense that we would stay in motion and never settle in one patch for too long. 

In the words of long-time internet marketer Seth Godin, “The reason that most online videos and blog posts seem to come and go is because we use a browser to interact with them. ‘What’s next?’ is asked too often.”

Our attention is the prize, and we are carelessly handing it out to the lowest bidder every time we reach for our phones, in large part because we have no understanding on how to protect it or where to point it to maximize true wellbeing. So our attention gets pushed and pulled and fractured into every corner of our lives, minds, and environments — never truly focused on anything as we attempt to focus on (manage) it all.

We pride ourselves on ‘multitasking’, foraging the content marketplace for productivity tips and ‘life hacks’, looking for ways to do it all, do it efficiently, and do it all now— so that we can finally just relax into satisfaction once we’re on the other side of this inbox, to-do list, or week.

As Daniel Levitin says in Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in an Age of Information Overload, “Every status update you read on Facebook, every tweet or text message you get from a friend, is competing for resources in your brain with important things like whether to put your savings in stocks or bonds, where you left your passport, or how best to reconcile with a close friend you just had an argument with.”

So we skim, browse, watch, listen and scroll, somehow at once receiving an astounding amount of information, and simultaneously none at all (Americans in 2011 took in 5 times as much information per day as they did in 1986, an equivalent of 171 newspapers.). We pore through information-dense podcasts and audio books far beyond our saturation point, leaving no space for reflection or processing before we’re deep into the next episode. 

In truth, this abundance of content can be quite a positive feature, as users can scroll through instagram and passively learn anything they’d like in bits of short form and easily digestible content. But as we’ll see, we tend to read the catchy headlines and ditch the long-form nuanced discussions. Infographics and over simplified one-liners get shared millions of times and the vital details get left behind.

It’s always new, too: minutes (or seconds!) after scrolling through your feed you can hit refresh and get dosed with a brand new wave of feel good. Tristan Harris, the mind behind the hit Netflix doc The Social Dilemma and ex-Google employee who now advocates for ethical and humane technology, likens this feature to the slots at Vegas — if I just keeping pulling and refreshing, something especially interesting or exciting will appear next — which also creates a FOMO effect that keeps us checking, over and over, so that we don’t — god forbid — fall out of the loop or fall behind.

We need to stay busy because to be idle or still brings with it a mountain of guilt (we ought to be productive now, shouldn’t we?), so we fill our moments with ways to get more done, learn more, improve, or otherwise stay occupied. When we’re not doing, we’re scrolling.

And perhaps most importantly, this browsing is not through a diversified sampling of the full expanse of options and perspectives that’s actually available out there on the world wide web, or even within a single app like instagram. 

We are scrolling through echo chambers and slight variations of what we already like and believe, the algorithm-fueled matrix that is subtly but powerfully ramifying opinions, hardening identities, and deepening divides. But more on that later.

Godin continues, “Perhaps it would be more useful to imagine that this is the very last thing we get to engage in before we have to commit to our work. When we adopt the posture of commitment, something extraordinary happens: The lessons get more profound and useful. The questions asked get more specific and urgent. The connections that are made get deeper.”

But a commitment to here and now is an exceptionally hard sell to a culture that worships busy and the perpetual browsing for next. Especially when we don’t even see clearly what and why we’re actually buying, and the price we’re truly paying for it.

The Joneses

As the poet Subha said, “They all told me the same thing— there’s only one way to be truly safe. Get as much as you can and hold on tight.”

More, newer, better, next: consumption is our salve for boredom, our cure for dissatisfaction, our sole stress-management tactic.  Our endless collection of stuff is how we self soothe, jockey for social rank, and attempt to create meaning and a sense of safety in our lives. 

Consumption is our favorite pastime, and we have never, ever had more access to content (and goods) to consume in the history of humanity. As I write these words, hundreds of container ships are piled up around US ports, putting our Amazon addictions on global display, and these backlogs (and the data) are making one thing abundantly clear: we are buying more than ever, and have more incoming ships filled with the results of our mindless add-to-cart habits than we have the capacity to manage as a nation.

We buy because frankly here and now is hard to bear, and we know that like hitting ‘refresh’ on our feed, obtaining a new thing or getting a new notification carries a tiny shimmer of chemical pleasure that, though fleeting, is sweet enough to keep us coming back for more. So we continue to fill our homes with things we don’t need that we saw in an Instagram ad.  

But this consumerism is more than just an escape from the here and now for us: We view our belongings as extensions and displays of who we are — the way in which we define and affirm ourselves, signaling where we stand, what be believe, and who our people are (and are not). We purchase to establish status, to climb our way through various social hierarchies, and keep up with the influencer Joneses. We buy because the materialist ideology that raised us tells us that accumulation of nice things is the pinnacle of success and prestige.

But, as economist and sociologist Juliet Schor attests, we don’t quite recognize these deeper motives, and instead our consumerism is “experienced more as identity or natural desire. If you think about the particular things people want, it mostly has to do with being the kind of person that they think they are because there’s a consumption style connected with that. The role of what are called reference groups — the people we compare ourselves to, the people we identify with — is really key in that.”

We know Instagram ignites comparison in its users, but the way this comparison influences and forces identity is a more subtle, but potent, cog in the machine that’s breaking down in our collective and individual wellbeing.

While consumerism has been a mainstay of American culture for decades, this concept of “reference groups” has changed the playing field dramatically. Small and localized reference groups like neighborhoods, offices, or clubs have been expanded to a globalized scale— a world wide stage where we watch, study, and clamor for the lifestyles we see on our screens. Schor calls the result of this shift “competitive consumption, [the idea that we spend because we’re comparing ourselves with our peers and what they’re spending]. It can be hard to keep up, particularly if standards are escalating rapidly, as we’ve seen.”

(In the philosopher Mathew Stewart ‘s book, “The 9.9%: The New Aristocracy That is Entrenching Inequality and Warping Our Culture” he examines elements of this trap and the group of Americans that are especially caught in and exacerbating it. “There is an ethos of approaching life as a kind of optimization problem”, he says.)

Consumption on this scale is not only clogging our ships, ports, roads, and homes, it’s filling our minds with noise that is keeping us from ourselves.  We want to feel better but we don’t want to stop to actually savor or digest the fruits of the patch we’re in, because we are certain that there’s something better coming next if we can just get more. 

And we know precisely what more is, because we saw it on Instagram.

As Schor says, “it can be very rational and compelling for people to do something that, in the end, doesn’t necessarily make them all that better off, but that failing to do requires really a major effort and going against the social grain in a very big way.” 

We are still aiming for the highest gain with the littlest effort, but our calculations are far from accurate (a pattern we will see repeating here in all corners). Once we actually attain the very thing that we’ve been longing for for days, years or decades — the job, the jewelry, the answer to our query — we look ahead, we scroll past, and we fix our attention on next, once again. We are chasing moving goal posts in an attempt to arrive at satisfaction, but, as Watts said, arrival never quite seems to appear. 

So we stay locked in rat races, status climbing, buying competitively and browsing indefinitely, because to leave this global reference group is to ignore the next vital directive for a chance at happiness. 

How will we know how to finally arrive if no one is telling us exactly what that looks like?

Creator Culture

A chicken-or-the-egg conundrum awaits us on the other side of this insatiable digital consumerism: the brands, individuals and influencers that are creating the mountain of content available for our consumption. 

One of the more seemingly beneficial facets of social media is the way in which anyone, anywhere can get their voice heard with the tap of ‘publish’. Small businesses can market with little to no ad expense by delivering valuable content to their audience regularly, establishing brand awareness and trust that turns cold leads into clients with relative quickness, if done right. The results of this modern day launchpad are ones that I have felt and enjoyed myself — getting a successful business off the ground without any of the traditional and expensive marketing strategies that was once required is an incredible feature of social media.

Across all industries, from household products to career coaching to fitness, all gaining a customer base requires is a consistent presence on your app of choice (Instagram, for example), where you create and share valuable content to potential customers regularly.

Seems easy and innocuous enough, right?

While there’s room for interpretation on what “consistent presence” means to each creator individually, the consensus generally converges around whatever is enough to keep you top of mind, relevant, and always appearing on your audience’s app somehow, somewhere. 

But you can’t just post pictures of your lunch here — valuable is the key word. So each post, story, podcast, blog post, etc, must contain something of value to your particular audience: a lesson, a how-to, a takeaway, some food for thought that may inspire a slight shift in their thinking or behavior in some beneficial way. Or at the very least, a barely perceptible pause in their scrolling.

Surely there are content creators and small business owners who maintain perennial enthusiasm and delight in developing this staggering volume of content, but in my 9 years of running an online business, I have yet to meet one. Broadly speaking, yes: there is great fulfillment to being in a position of offering advice or lessons to those who truly need and benefit from the help, and this really is one of the highlights of Instagram or social media at large. This is not unimportant.

But in my personal experience and informal private conversations with colleagues, this “consistent social media presence” of “sharing valuable content” begins to make one feel like an informational puppy mill: hundreds of thousands (millions?) of individual pages become industrialized content farms, each one attempting to create something just valuable enough to hold on to your attention for a few seconds longer, pumping out content at a breakneck speed, even trying to out-compete their own “value”. 

It is an exhausting pursuit of next in its own right, as the moment ‘publish’ is pressed, the hurried scavenging for the next post begins. Burnout, disillusionment, mental fatigue, depletion and resentment are common (if not omnipresent) experiences of online business owners and content creators.

So while the idea of many voices all sharing helpful information to those who want or need it is, on the surface, a wonderful and benevolent advance in our society, in practice what it often requires to be heard (and stay heard) from the creator side is an all-consuming dedication to quantity that is rapidly diminishing quality. 

And with an audience (hi, that’s all of us) who are on the hunt for next and can’t seem to scroll fast enough — but certainly don’t have the time to sit and read — the survival of the fittest in the jungle of content tends to be eye-catching infographics that oversimplify complex issues, appealing but misinformed one-liners, headlines without depth, and anything else that will lasso emotion or attention just long enough to hopefully be “liked” and shared before it vanishes into the feed ether and goes to the content graveyard.

This, of course, is by design — and the tyrannical architect of this relentless pressure to remain in perpetual eyesight of your audience with endless nuggets of value is once again, the algorithm. Should your content not be intriguing enough to garner a pause in an individual’s scroll, your priority in that user’s feed gets bumped down. And should this happen with any amount of regularity, you stand to vanish from their feed altogether, as the algorithm favors other accounts they follow that it predicts they might like more, based on one factor alone: engagement.

The race for compelling content is a race for your engagement, because high engagement means that creators will keep their hold in your feed and even stand to be bumped up in your networks’. What’s the use in working this hard to create all of this valuable content if it's never going to be seen by anyone? 

Engagement is the holy grail of social media, and the only way to attempt to access it is through seizing your attention— not once, but always: every post, every time, every day.  

Consequently, the service-based sharing of thoughtful and valuable information tends to devolve with time into a desperate clamoring for attention at any cost, by even the most well-intentioned creators — left no choice but to dance when the algorithm says dance — because the alternative is to disappear from the stage altogether.

And dancing for Instagram is not a euphemism — it is quite literally what creators are doing right now as the app has adopted TikTok’s model into it’s newest form of content (reels), and at the moment the algorithm is favoring reels above the grid, Instagram live, stories, IGTV, and the rest of its own dizzying litany of content options. 

Open the app and you will see page after page of content creators, small business owners, coaches, therapists, doctors, and the like, dancing around in 20 second videos that contain bite sized lessons or tips— and perhaps it’s just me, but the reluctancy is palpable, the peppiness forced, the marionette strings visible. 

The algorithm says dance, and so we literally, begrudgingly, dance.

It’s this same structure, combined with the obscene volume of content being published at any given moment, that’s also flattening thoughtful and nuanced discussions on important topics into binary side-choosing. Both content creators and consumers are algorithmically corralled into skimming the surface, leaving behind depth and complexities, simply because nuance can’t be adequately conveyed in the only 20 seconds of attention they can garner through tap-dancing.

ENTERTAINMENT: The Cool Kids V the Canceled

Celebrity Culture

This frenzied grasping for eyeballs, relevancy, engagement, and influence is not limited to small business owners and creators: it has become a feature of the app itself even among average users — a toxicity that has spilled over and infected our lives off of the apps in myriad ways, quietly forging a performative culture that is hurting us as much individually as it is collectively.

A 2012 study found that adolescents desired fame — solely for the sake of being famous — over all other life achievements, including financial success and a sense of community. Focus groups in Los Angeles found that a staggering 40 percent of 4th to 6th graders ranked fame first in a list of values, over options like kindness and self-acceptance. And this data aren’t only for children: research found that one out of every 12 millennials (who are now well in their 30s) would completely abandon their families in exchange for fame.

The “fame motive” is not necessarily new, but it has been exacerbated by apps like Instagram, where regular people become influencers and influencers become celebrities; where talent is democratized and the ability to go viral is available to everyone; where follower count, likes and engagement have become our most highly valued social currency.

Celebrity culture — the pedestalization of and preoccupation with public figures, and our drive to join their ranks — has become an epidemic in its own right as celebs, through their personal social media accounts, are now more accessible and visible than ever, and therefore set the bar for what we dream and aspire to. Len Sherman suggests that this fanatic worship of fame and its faces is in part “due to leadership vacuums and declining trust of institutions” — which I’m sure we can all agree we’ve see our fair share of this in the States, of late. He says, “while celebrities might not have been obvious replacements, they were functional equivalents of leaders: people who represented, influenced, perhaps inspired and commanded our attention, if not respect. In addition, they possessed a kind of exemplary authority.” This shift turned well-known figures into what Sherman describes as ‘the most watched, admired, privileged, and imitated people.’’

Even in “old media” like television (or its modern sister, streaming), regular people get launched to stardom left and right on reality tv by making their lives available for us to consume, much like an Instagram feed. Wealth on its own is enough to inspire starry-eyed fanaticism and entire shows and series, as evidenced by the Real Housewives conglomerate. Being known and being rich (and nothing else) can get you an empire like the Kardashians or elected to the highest government office in the world.

Teachers, first responders and thought leaders are nice and all, but movie stars and reality tv characters are who we pay, celebrate and admire (the 2021 budget for Netflix alone is $13.6 billion). Is this a product of our perpetual need to be distracted from our own lives or of our obsession with fame itself? 

Either way, the message is clear: if we just aim for wealth and celebrity, we can get or do anything we want— from a just-for-funsies trip to space, to becoming the leader of the free world. Success, money, power, and anything else you may want is yours, if you just get a big enough fan base.

We are not only diehard consumers, but due to the astronomical expansion of our “reference groups” that now include celebrities and perfectly styled influencers opening the door to their homes and lifestyles to us on every imaginable screen, combined with the possibility of fame that is promised on apps like Instagram, we are now also aspirational and competitive consumers — our personal goals, highest values, and biggest dreams for our own short time on this planet have been molded by social media; our sense of purpose, meaning and fulfillment pointed towards consumerism on a celebrity scale.

To be successful on the app we must dance in a way that captures attention, approval, and engagement, and it’s not difficult to see how these values have bled into every corner of our real lives, including our definition of success itself.

While there’s many psychosocial factors at play in this new fangled rush for followers and views and the faux fulfillment and happiness that it advertises, it’s evident that at the heart of this drive for ostentatious wealth, success, and celebrity is our primal human emotional need to be validated, to garner social approval. We just want to be seen.

“After all, celebrity is the ultimate high school in-group, writ large. It appears a perfect balm for the sting of social exclusion, or neglect by emotionally or physically absent parents.”, says Benedict Carey of the New York Times. And I would be quick to add to that assessment: celebrity (or any reliance on external validation) seems to quell the sting of personal rejection and neglect, and our own chronic absence from our own lives.

With our minds and attention being fought over and splintered as we attempt to be a person in the world, pay our bills, get shit done, and work (work!) like our goodness and value depends on it, we are never truly here. We have abandoned ourselves and forgotten what matters most to us in exchange for a ticket to the Metaverse.

We are grown ups wandering through the digital halls of Instagram hoping to fall into favor with the most popular girl in school and attain our own base of adoring fans. We need to have the whole school like us because we do not like ourselves. We need to stay in line with popular opinion because we do not possess the tools to handle the judgement or scorn should it come our way.

And, oh — it certainly does. 

High Stakes High School

Handing a microphone to every adult on the planet has more consequence than just a frenzied dash for fame. We are now speaking to and hearing from a truly staggering number of voices on a daily basis, far beyond our saturation point. According to the anthropologist Robin Dunbar, 150 humans is the limit to the amount of relationships and social connections that we can maintain. Our newfound ability to broadcast and listen to a colossal amount of individuals though social media is something that our brains just simply do not have the ability to properly navigate.

Evolutionarily and developmentally, we seek safety by adhering to the values of those within our primary family units and greater communities, inheriting their beliefs and abiding by them because on some level we know that to turn against them is to risk social exclusion. Whether we were a hunter gatherer thousands of years ago whose physical safety would be in jeopardy without the protection of the tribe, or we are a modern day Westerner whose emotional safety is at risk without the approval of our caregivers or peers, our loyalty to in-group beliefs is born of self preservation.

It’s not that yearning for social approval is new, or wrong. The issue is that we’re not looking for this safety within our family or community of ~150 people anymore: we’re attempting to establish this social approval at an astronomical scale. Social media is high stakes high school where the winners get a million views and book deals and the losers get canceled and shamed on a level that humanity (and our individual biology) doesn’t have the capacity to handle.

While there are some victims of cancel culture that arguably deserve to have their microphone revoked, the mobs seem to come for anyone who steps even a toe out of line: a line that is always moving. Accidental or intentional deviations from the mainstream talking point du jour result in shame-driven “accountability spectacles” (to use Molly Frances’s term) that ignite comment sections and truly only have one result: boosting our own sense of goodness and importance, and affirming our loyalty to the online in-groups.

There is an explicit expectation (demand) on those with any amount of following to provide an opinion or post on every current event both public and private (immediately!), where it is subsequently judged for its correctness. And not only can a wrong word here get you canceled, but no words at all have become an equally egregious offense. After the death of Willie Garson, her costar and real-life friend of 30 years, Sarah Jessica Parker was skewered on social media by her own fans because three days passed before she shared public words on the loss — one very small example of the intolerance to ‘silence’, and our promotion of instantaneous, globally broadcast reaction above thoughtful response.

“Posts beget discourse that begets ever more posts that take the place of action, let alone knowledge,” says Ian Bogost. Our posts become purity tests and our feeds become rumor mills that review the results of those tests— gossipy Burn Books that are on one level a judgement of everyone else’s goodness or badness, but in a much truer sense, a judgement of our own.

In-group/out-group identity-driven self righteousness disguised as morality and critical change-making is the engine that drives much of this digital policing of everyone else’s opinion: when we can call out the bad guys, we’re doing our part to create a more just and tolerant society. And as such, the better we feel, but more importantly, the better we look. Because after all, this is a stage, and everyone’s watching.

Critical thinking, intellectual processing, even grief — all vital mechanisms for navigating and metabolizing this vast universe of information hurtling past us 24/7— have been lost and replaced with harried urgency, virtue signaling, and blind compliance to the prevailing groupthink. 

The Shame Show

In Africa Brooke’s essay titled, “Why I’m Leaving the Cult of Wokeness”, she reflects on a turning point of her own “indoctrination” into this widespread phenomenon when she received a private comment from a stranger and shared it to her feed, “deconstructing his direct message publicly with the intention to embarrass him, not to resolve anything - to embarrass.”

“What frightened me was the applause I got from over 4,000 people when I called out this man in an Instagram post”, a public shaming that has become a commonplace and normalized occurrence in almost every corner of the social internet. “After seeing the responses applauding me, I removed the post and started asking myself some questions; who am I doing this for? Why did my interaction with this man need to be publicized? What is really the root of the anger I feel? Do I really believe this or am I regurgitating something I read/heard/saw somewhere? Is this a performance on my behalf?”

When we are intoxicated by pedestal to the extent that we are, we’ll find that whether we intend to or not, we are now placing not only movie stars upon it, but influencers and content creators alike. Expanding, yet again, our reference groups and their influence— crowd sourcing our own thoughts, desires, and actions from the accounts we follow. “Followers” seems eerily apt.

I caught this belief-deferring in myself, more than once, as various cultural events would unfold and I was compelled to open instagram to see what “we” think of it all, and in what direction the discourse was stampeding. 

Occasionally, we step onto our own pedestals as well, using our stages — er, “platforms” — to not only dance for the algorithm, but for our own edification: a declaration of hyper-dependance on everyone else’s ideas and our allegiance to the new orthodoxy (regardless of if we share those values or not), because it’s the right thing to do. And also, the mobs demand it. 

Fear — of public shaming spectacles, of cancellation, of failing the virtue test — has become a guidepost of Instagram, and it's not only driving self censorship and distrust of our own opinions, but its widening divides between us.

We know that shame doesn’t change behavior, and we don’t need to reference the mountain of data that prove it (on which Brene Brown has built her entire career) — you can watch it yourself the next time you shame yourself for engaging in that habit you wish you wouldn’t be doing (scrolling instagram, say?), and see how effective it is at truly adjusting your actions in a sustainable way. We know this, yet we find ourselves sucked into the cliquish and binary worldview of right or wrong every time we open the app, proving ourself good and useful as we “hold accountable” the wrong, and proclaim ourselves loyal to the right.

To be clear, much of this is done innocently, with the best of intentions in mind, and not in a maniacal Mean Girl kind of way, as some of this may suggest. We do truly want a more just and tolerant world, we want to be of value, to help where it’s needed, to speak out about important issues, to create dialogue where it matters, and to be a part of something bigger than ourselves: to have purpose. 

But like everything else it touches, Instagram culture degrades even this sincere intention into a circus of engagement. Hashtags, movements, trends, infographics, challenges, spread like wildfire and take the place of careful thought and real action. The popular kid’s blessing, going viral, displays of moral superiority: this becomes the prize. And not only does none of it not actually do anything in the way we hope it will, but none of it cures the very real malady of chronic absence from our own lives that is running under the surface.

We chase this outward validation from the world through adolescent conformist social politics, because we want to belong, we want to be seen, we want meaning and purpose— but our fixation on the public stage where everyone else performs their lives keeps us permanently faced away from the only one who can truly give us the sense of belonging that we’re searching for: ourselves.

When we combine the influencing ingredients of celebrity culture and its aspirational consumerism, the democratization of microphones that create potential for fame and wealth, and the adaptive drive towards safety that fuels both the angry mobs demanding conformism and the resulting idealogical compliance alike, we have ourselves a perfect recipe for a culture that excels in performance and lacks depth.

In truth, we’re all losers here, because the stakes are more than a lifetime of eating alone in the digital cafeteria. The issues that need us the most in this world are also the ones that require the most nuance, context, and thoughtful consideration (not to mention discourse). The hostile culture wars playing out on Instagram promote censorship, compliance, and binary, oversimplified thinking, and are therefore changing us all for the worse. If we think for one second that the political right is the only side getting radicalized through social media, we have been thoroughly asleep at the wheel.

We are raging at each other in the name of kindness, ostracizing each other in the name of acceptance, judging each other in the name of tolerance, and all the while, failing to see how deeply we have begun to confuse our human lives, our beings, with our Instagram profiles.

In the poetic words of Maria Popova:

“One of the saddest tendencies in our present culture is an indignant intolerance for the basic humanity of being human. People of the past are harshly judged by the standards of the present (which their own difficult lives helped establish), and people of the present are harshly judged by impossible (and hypocritical, in the full context of any judger’s life) standards of uniform perfection across all regions of private and public existence. And yet the eternal test of character — our great moral triumph — is the ability to face our own imperfections with composure, reflecting on them with lucid and luminous determination to do better — an essential form of moral courage all the more difficult, and all the more important, amid a cultural atmosphere that mistakes self-righteousness for morality and suffocates the basic impulse toward betterment with punitive intolerance for human foible.”

Back in 5: Out Looking For a Hit

Tv. Podcasts. Social media. Audio books. Shows. Nearly every single waking minute of our days are filled with noise. We scroll as soon as we wake, we tune in on our commutes, we scroll waiting in line, we stream while we cook and eat, we scroll in bed.

Are we more addicted to escape or to the illusion of productivity? Either way, we have entirely lost the deeply valuable ability to simply be—  our relationships to ourselves have suffered, and we are stuck on a feedback loop that is ramifying the root cause of it all.

Most people find the idea of sitting alone in silence doing nothing, even for 4 minutes, to be one that ranges from unappealing to full on excruciating, and either consciously or unconsciously will do everything they can to avoid finding themselves in this icky circumstance.

Many of us can’t make it through a red light, a trip to the loo, or a supermarket checkout line without reflexively pulling out our phones and opening Instagram. Let’s really take a moment to appreciate this astonishing aversion to being alone with ourselves. We cannot —will not — stand the possibility of catching even the slightest glimpse into our minds.

We arm ourselves with distraction after distraction, all disguised as information, entertainment or connection, but in truth is a variety pack of Escape Buttons that will launch us out of our minds, out of our lives, out of here and now, and deliver unto us a sweet rush of our favorite neurotransmitter: dopamine. 

Every time we open the app, hit refresh, get a notification, or see our Likes, we get a hit. And when we’re not on our screens, chances are good we’ve got our hands in an alternative but equivalent Escape Button: shopping (we have a LOT of Joneses to keep up with), eating, drinking, even working out. All tasks that we feign interest, intention or necessity in but is, deep down, simply acting as a way to fill the silence, the time, the discomfort of now— while inching us closer to the benchmarks of materialistic success and who we think we should be.

We need to stay busy because we need to feel better. We need something — anything — to relieve us from the burden of our own minds. The voice in our head is one we don’t like, especially the one that pipes up if or when we stop for a moment. It judges us, shames us, sends us into spirals of anxiety, and compares us to not only those in our lives, but everyone we see on our screens all day long. We have no education on how to shift this internal experience, so our only option is to distract ourselves away from it, and man alive do we have a plethora of delicious options to help us do just that.

So when a moment appears that is quiet enough for us to hear our own thoughts, we run — attempting to push away the discomfort by dosing ourselves with the lowest hanging fruit on the Feel Good Tree.

This behavior loop might not seem dissimilar from one you see with substance addiction, and it’s not: our relationship to instagram literally fires and produces “the same neural circuitry that is caused by gambling and recreational drugs to keep consumers using their products as much as possible. Studies have shown that the constant stream of retweets, likes, and shares from these sites cause the brain’s reward area to trigger the same kind of chemical reaction seen with drugs like cocaine. In fact, neuroscientists have compared social media interaction to a syringe of dopamine being injected straight into the system.”

The report from the Addiction Center continues, classifying this addiction as “driven by an uncontrollable urge to log on to or use social media, and devoting so much time and effort to social media that it impairs other important life areas.”

As Tristan Harris notably quipped, there are only two industries that call their customers “users”, and social media is one of them. Dopamine rules our days and lives as we chase cheap hits of anything that will improve this not-quite-good-enough present moment, event just slightly. The here and now is too unbearable, and the Escape Buttons are too sweet — we know the reward is ephemeral and we are doomed to return back to our own lives and minds after its short rush fades, potentially even emptier than before, but we are ill-equipped or uninterested in facing ourselves without it.

On some level, we know this — often sensing our addiction to the screens more than our own aversion to ourselves, though they are inextricably interlinked. We experiment with logging off or deleting Instagram for hours here or a day or two there and know in a felt, empirical sense that we truly do feel markedly better all around without it, and yet still find ourselves sucked back in, every time.

Our “uncontrollable” impulse to open the app overrides our knowledge of what promotes our own sense of well being. We can feel this dissonance within us, but we simply don’t know how to address it. So we keep scrolling, even when we know we don’t want to. What are we doing?

We are bored, unhappy, and in constant wars with ourselves, and we just want to feel better. But with no idea how to meet emotions like anxiety or shame, no idea how to truly take care of ourselves, and no idea of how to cultivate the contentment and deep sense of wellbeing that we are in search of, we rely on outward distraction and external approval to attempt to fill our internal voids.

And herein lies one of the most fascinating (and problematic) paradoxes of this entire phenomenon. 

CONNECTION: The Lines Between Us

Mental Health & Instagram

Research has shown that regardless of age and across all demographics (though some surely more than others), American’s mental health has been on a steady decline for decades — and this was even before COVID-19 created what is being called a “mental health crisis”.

While there are always many complex genetic, environmental, and social factors that influence any one individual’s mental health (a global pandemic notwithstanding), one thing is for sure: as a whole, we’re not doing too great. 

We are more disconnected, unsatisfied, stressed, and unhappy than we’ve possibly ever been, and as we’ve been exploring here, it’s not hard to see why. We are active participants in a culture that worships busyness, status, fame, work and wealth. Our model of success is sold to us on Instagram as fit bodies, magazine-quality homes, trendy clothes, lavish vacations, and other status signals that promise the lasting satisfaction that we’ve been waiting our entire lives for. So we set those goals as our highest values and spend our short days on earth in their desperate pursuit, once again, never quite arriving.

We are burned out but believe rest is for the lazy, the morally bankrupt, or the weak. Our vision of success and our ruthless dedication to getting close to it (or looking as if we’re close to it) are making us sick and miserable, but we keep climbing. Because after all, our education and culture at large taught us diligently how to win at the American Dream, while never uttering a word on how to understand or navigate the precious finitude of our own one human life: how to exist peacefully with our ever-changing experience and with the truth of our own mortality.

Recently, and not terribly surprisingly, the public interest in the latter has begun to grow, and the younger generations are beginning to change course on the traditional Don Draper American trajectory — opting out of home ownership, having children, or the corner office. There seems to be a growing understanding that if we want to experience real peace in our life, regardless of circumstance, it’s not going to arrive with a 401k or a white picket fence. We have to spend some time and effort reflecting on our patterns, beliefs, and the nature of mind at large. We need to improve our relationship with the here and now.

Perhaps the pandemic exacerbated this shift as the abrupt disruption in everyone’s daily lives and habits forced a reckoning for many (looking at you, Great Resignation), or maybe it is a natural response to the late capitalism that surrounds us, combined with an general decline in stigma around mental health conversation, but either way: our interest in our broader well being has sky-rocketed, as evidenced by the spike in consumption of apps and content focused in this area.

So we feel bad and we don’t know how to make sense of ourselves or the world around us, and we’re looking for help. So we pick up our phones. “Mental health Instagram” has been a booming corner of the app, with therapists and coaches teaching their followers how to better understand themselves and lead happier lives as a result. 

I am one of those coaches, and this is “my” corner of the app, so I know it well — I delighted in being able to help my followers be able to access peace or self acceptance from reading a post or listening to a podcast (for free and with little effort), even if it was only a tiny, one degree shift.  

It mattered, and it still matters. There are countless benefits to the rise of these types of accounts and their growing interest. People are finding their own values and voices and beginning to venture out from the aforementioned illusion of safety found in conforming to conditioned belief. People are understanding that their parents were flawed humans, just like themselves, and are untangling the places within them where their influence still lingers but no longer serves. People are seeing relationships in new light, including their own relationship with themselves. People are beginning to say no, set boundaries, experiment with rest and meditation. People are committing to their own self actualization, healing, and wellbeing. This is deeply valuable.

But what implored me to leave my social media accounts for good was the startling realization of how even this area of (mis)information and (dis)connection was being (mis)used. Like everything else that trends on Instagram, the most widely shared and engaged with posts tend to be the ones that grossly oversimplify the issue at hand, and ultimately deepen divides.

This is Me Now

So here we are. Stressed out, unfulfilled, always busy, and thoroughly unhappy. So we search the Metaverse for ourselves. For meaning. For something. Looking for a niche, an idea, a community, a balm, a solution. And truthfully, its an appealing place to look, because compared to the arduous and daunting process of inquiring into our small place among the vast universe, it’s pretty easy. 

We have to move fast, because the internet moves fast. Agree or disagree? Is this you? Yes or no? We make a call and pick a side within an instant, not only to appease the mobs (remember we must have an opinion on everything, immediately), but because more and more, our own sense of self depends on it.

With the recognition of our own perennial dissatisfaction, we begin to see our lives, our patterns, our thoughts, our selves as broken and in need of fixing. So we set out on a well intentioned quest to find and arm ourselves with solutions and information that will help us make sense of it all and feel better, if even briefly. 

And boy, do we find it. At least we think we do, anyway.

In mental health Instagram, diagnoses abound, and users snap up identities under decontextualized, oversimplified, broad-stroke anecdotal snippets of content. In one example shared by Vox’s Rebecca Jennings, “a woman posted a TikTok suggesting that ‘excessive reading’ in childhood was considered a ‘dissociative behavior.’ In the video, she turns to the camera and shakes her head as if having a sudden, life-altering realization that explains the trajectory of her life; the comments are flooded with people experiencing the same aha moment. ‘12th grade reading level in 5th grade you say? Damn … #trauma,’ wrote one. ‘At this point all the character traits I have are just my neurodivergence,’ wrote another.”

Toxic people. Trauma. ADHD. Narcissist. Anxiety. Empath. To name a few of the trendy labels getting thrown around ad nauseam on Instagram.

Now. The accessibility of these open, public conversations about our own private mental worlds are surely helping to destigmatize mental health issues in some capacity, and it’s true that some may find great comfort in being able to apply a word to a pattern they possess themselves or witness in others. I always support learning to understand our own humanity better, and stumbling on a term that illuminates or lightens an area of personal confusion or frustration can be a powerful step in doing just that. What’s more, the acquisition of this new terminology or language can often lead to a discovery of a bigger community behind it that can offer solace and camaraderie around what may have once felt a shameful, or private experience. And it of course goes without mentioning that (actual) medical diagnoses can be extremely valuable, if not lifesaving.

In short: There are truly some beneficial pieces of mental health Instagram that are helping some people. But the other, darker, truth is that this is just another place (if not the biggest place) in which we are collecting and clinging to identities that keep us pitted against not only everyone else, but ourselves.

As Isabel Munson says in her examination of how our social feeds conflate diagnosis with identity, “social media platforms drive not just self-expression but self-discovery. They are a means of production for identity, which affects our sense of what identity is for and what motivates how we refine it. Just as capitalism engenders the belief that our value is determined by our productivity, ‘social’ as a business category influences our concept of the self… the aesthetic and the personality we project, the labels we apply to ourselves. Many social media bios are a collection of such identifiers: astrology sign, pronouns, gender and sexual orientation, political orientations, mental illnesses, disabilities, location, age, Myers-Briggs type, fandoms, jobs, hobbies, and more.”

P.E. Moskawitz puts it this way in their piece, “The Buzzfeedification of Mental Health”: “We are, in essence, constantly BuzzFeed-quizzing each other to find out where our alliances lie, who we can trust, and who we can feel in community with, because without those categories, life on the internet would be much too vast, disagreeable, and scary a space.”

But not only are we losing the context and nuance that true health (mental or otherwise) actually requires as we Buzzfeed-quiz our way to self diagnoses, we are losing the nuance and context of who we are as we flatten our humanity to singular term and identity.

This conflation of an isolated facet of our experience as humans, with who we are as humans is calcified through the very app that it was conceived on. “Whereas a therapist might question the usefulness of identifying oneself as permanently aligned with whatever struggle one is experiencing, engagement-driven platforms help frame conditions as points of identity, badges of honor,” Munson says.

And it should come as no surprise to anyone here that each of these engagement-born labels, communities and identities that we wear as badges of honor and line up in our bios are all data points that build out our individual consumer profiles. They make us easier to sell to.

In a paper titled Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Contemporary Visual Culture and The Acceleration of Identity Formation and Dissolution, written (interestingly) by the founder of BuzzFeed, Jonah Peretti examines the connection between our clamoring for identity and the corporate structures on which we’re searching:

 “The increasingly rapid rate at which images are distributed and consumed in late capitalism necessitates a corresponding increase in the rate that individuals assume and shed identities. Because advertisements link identity with the need to purchase products, the acceleration of visual culture promotes the hyper-consumption associated with late capitalism.”

And what is more “visual culture” than Instagram? It is quite literally changing and shaping the way we see and think of ourselves. Because after all, who are we without our belongings? Who are we without our opinions, our likes and dislikes? What should we want if we’re not being shown what to aim for?

So we wear our mental health identities as we do all others: clinging to them fiercely, as the algorithm embeds us further in community (read: echo chamber rabbit holes) of self help content (read: 20 second videos of people dancing and pointing to words) that teaches us how to navigate the world as This Kind of Person.

And to reiterate: having even tidbits of helpful information on these topics can be deeply helpful to some, and being able to learn in such a passive and free way can be be highly convenient.

But it is in this very hunting for solutions that we ramify our sense of “problem”.

“The WebMD of Mental Health”

The structure of an app like Instagram, the nature of the content that fills it, and several sneaky inherent cognitive biases in us mere mortals, means that we are forcing ourselves (or, being forced) into defining ourselves in binary and bizarrely simplified concepts and labels every time we scroll the app. 

Seeking safety through consumption, social approval, and idealogical compliance is not the only way that our natural cognitive biases and blindspots have been hacked, leveraged, or unwittingly turned against us for social media’s gain.

Whether we like to think so or not, we are driven by emotions and are drawn to topics and posts that poke or resonate with us emotionally. Not terribly surprisingly, content surrounding our internal wellbeing triggers this salience bias— meaning we tend to not only perk up and pay attention to this content, but thoroughly buy in and believe whatever has the highest emotional valence for us. 

We can certainly see the ripple effect of this bias and the way platforms hack it across all corners of the internet (Facebook actively promoted posts that got “angry” reactions in order to boost it’s engagement, for example). But this is also especially insidious and when it comes to our own self view.


We continue to see ourselves not only as one dimensional labels or oversimplified concepts, but on a deeper level, we see ourselves as broken systems with inherent defects that need fixing — so we once again look to Instagram to tell us where the solution to our woes lie. We forage and consume, scrolling through posts telling us how to love ourselves, how to heal our trauma, how to be happy. 

And to be clear: some of this information can be found, applied, and is immeasurably helpful. But most of this information gets consumed the way we consume everything else: the surface skimmed, the nuance ignored, the implementation entirely skipped. Next.

It’s here that we find ourselves in massive synchronized destructive feedback loops: we feel unhappy, we read a piece of self-help content, we scroll on. We feel bored or anxious, we want to escape it, we open our phones, we scroll mental health Instagram. We feel isolated or lonely, we crave connection, we open a social media app and watch people dance. And when we put our phones down, we still feel unhappy, bored, anxious, lonely and entirely disconnected from ourselves and others, with perhaps only one detail more permanently altered: our self-view and our identities. Rinse and repeat.

The paradox here is a big one, with wide ramifications. We see the value of this content more in its acquisition and consumption than we do in its application or nuanced understanding. We’re using content designed to help us connect with ourselves as a means to keep us away from ourselves — self-help/healing content has become not only our favorite distraction, but often, the very agent that convinced us we have (or are) a problem in the first place. And all the while, the corporate behemoth that is housing all our happiness ‘solutions’ is the very machine that is actively enhancing our sense of loneliness, outrage, anxiety, dissatisfaction, comparison, and self-distrust.

In the words of cultural critic Molly Frances, “the world is bleak. It always has been, but right now it has a particular strain of surreal, disjointed bleakness that has lent itself to obsessive self-fixation in a scrambled search for security in words that perfectly capture some essence of ourselves.”

We have turned the experience of being human into a litany of diagnoses and problems to be fixed. To use Rebecca Jennings’ phrase, social media for many, has become “the WebMD” of our mental and emotional life: searching our symptoms, looking for a name, growing certain we have the worst of it, and falling deeper into our desperation for a cure, and our certainty of Who We Are, alike.

The rise of mental health content and interest is not evidence of our collective healing and peace, and is not enough to protect us from the damage of these apps that it lives on. It’s instead perhaps our most insidious Escape Button away from the here and now, a mechanism that’s hardening one-dimensional identities and distracting us from what we’re truly looking for.

We’re not healing, we’re just becoming more certain that we’re broken as we scroll through everyone else’s perfect-looking life on Instagram.

The Perfect Storm

This flattening of our humanity to a single product, diagnosis, or label doesn’t end with mental health Instagram, nor does it end with just ourselves. We are not only wearing labels (both conceptual labels, and the kind on our clothes and belongings) as our identities. We are, due to the structure of the media on which we are spending our days, donning ideas as our identity, too. When our ideas or beliefs get poked or questioned, we feel as if who we are is under attack. 

As Adam Grant says, “if you define yourself by your opinions, questioning them is a threat to your integrity.” The comment sections are as brutal as they are because in a sense, we are showing up in them attempting to defend our honor.

And we see others with differing ideas in this same light— this phenomenon extends out to everyone else we encounter, on and off the apps. Neuroscientist Jonas Kaplan discovered that when we are confronted with counter evidence to a belief we hold, the parts of our brain correlated with the emotion of disgust light up. “Challenges to political beliefs produced increased activity in the default mode network—a set of interconnected structures associated with self-representation and disengagement from the external world.”

It’s true that shared identities and beliefs can lead us to community, and community can be a bright spot of solace and comfort on the stained social media landscape— belief and belonging go hand in hand. “Community” is a concept that Zuckerberg himself uses to frame and promote his company’s mission altogether. 

It’s a beautiful thing that we are finding our “us” in ways we never have been able to before. But its vitally important that we see that with every “us” comes a “them”. 

We can’t possibly begin to hold space for the humanness in them when we haven’t the foggiest of how to do it for our own selves. So the divides widen, the beliefs harden, and we push further into our ‘community’ as we search for a safe harbor in the vast cold landscape of the internet, shaking our heads in disgust at (or publicly shaming and cancelling) them.

Facebook (which has recently rebranded its parent company to Meta) has come under fire lately as several whistleblowers have released a staggering amount of internal documents that show that it’s own employees are deeply concerned about the impact and influence of the social media apps it owns and runs.

In one document from The Facebook Papers, a staffer criticizes this concept of “community” within the company:

“When part of a community, individuals typically act in a prosocial manner. They conform, they forge alliances, they cooperate, they organize, they display loyalty, they expect obedience, they share information, they influence others, and so on. Being in a group changes their behavior, their abilities, and, importantly, their capability to harm themselves or others … Thus, when people come together and form communities around harmful topics or identities, the potential for harm can be greater.”

We shudder at the polarization in today’s world all while failing to see that the “world” has been bought and sold back to us as a one dimensional screen, where engagement at any cost reigns supreme, identity becomes your marketable consumer profile, community demands compliance, repetition implies truth, and our lives and ideas are indistinguishable from our Instagram accounts.

The Facebook Papers are common knowledge now, revealing what the company has known (what we all have known, to some degree) about its influence on violence, hate speech, misinformation, conspiracy theories, and political polarization and general outrage — we know that collectively, this app is driving us to extreme opposing corners and crumbling democracy.

But it’s worth highlighting a few of the most startling findings about how this company, and its Instagram arm specifically, is also crumbling us, individually.

Meta’s own research, titled “Teen Mental Health Deep Dive” found that Instagram makes “body image issues worse for one in three teen girls, [and] teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression”. As Facebook has become dominated by an older demographic and the online fights with people you met at that party 7 years ago and eccentric uncles has pushed many young people off the app — but Instagram is still growing, and is just as poisonous — if not moreso— than Facebook.

The research states that “social comparison is worse on Instagram,” versus other social media apps, as “aspects of Instagram exacerbate each other to create a perfect storm.” One that I have tried by best to illustrate here.

The Wall Street Journal wrote an analysis of this internal research, and says that “The features that Instagram identifies as most harmful to teens appear to be at the platform’s core. The tendency to share only the best moments, a pressure to look perfect and an addictive product can send teens spiraling toward eating disorders, an unhealthy sense of their own bodies and depression, March 2020 internal research states. 

‘Teens told us that they don’t like the amount of time they spend on the app but feel like they have to be present,’ an Instagram research manager explained to colleagues, according to the documents. ‘They often feel ‘addicted’ and know that what they’re seeing is bad for their mental health but feel unable to stop themselves.’”

Remember our conversation about celebrity culture, reference groups, and the preoccupation of influencers and famous peoples’ lives? The WSJ continues:

“In March, the researchers said Instagram should reduce exposure to celebrity content about fashion, beauty and relationships, while increasing exposure to content from close friends, according to a slide deck they uploaded to Facebook’s internal message board. A current employee, in comments on the message board, questioned that idea, saying celebrities with perfect lives were key to the app. ‘Isn’t that what IG is mostly about?’ he wrote. Getting a peek at ‘the (very photogenic) life of the top 0.1%? Isn’t that the reason why teens are on the platform?’

A now-former executive questioned the idea of overhauling Instagram to avoid social comparison. ‘People use Instagram because it’s a competition,’ the former executive said. ‘That’s the fun part.’” 

Shoots camera a Jim Halpert-style stare.

This is a corporation that knows precisely the damage and chaos it is leaving in its wake, but is profiting so obscenely from this mess that it hasn’t batted an eye. And it’s a corporation that increasingly has its fists wrapped around every single facet of our modern life — a fact that is too worrying to ignore.

To put it plainly: Every single piece of the entire Instagram experience is an advertisement— an incentive to buy. If you’re not selling, you’re being sold to. In fact, even if you’re selling, you’re still also being sold to. As Tristan Harris said, “if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.” Every post, every hashtag-fueled movement, every trend, every story or reel, every attempt to harness your attention— everything you encounter on the app is hoping to sell you on something — a product, an idea, an identity — and all of it is promising to deliver to you what we as humans want beyond all else: belonging, significance, pleasure, acceptance, success, safety. 

Our shared universal needs: the things that we are all, whether we realize it or not, actively finding ways to meet in our days, one way or another. Some of the ways in which we fulfill these needs truly serve us, and some ways keep us further from ourselves. For example, as social animals, we all crave belonging, but trying to be liked by everyone is a misguided attempt to meet this need. One that doesn’t actually foster the belonging we’re most in search of.

As we browse our screens, we are being subtly sold countless proxies and semblances of security, safety, and happiness. And we are snapping it all up as we get more and more unwell.

Information, entertainment, and connection is the surface sell behind the appeal of these apps, but we are more misinformed, outraged and alone than ever before, as we become easier and easier to market to and profit off of.

As Harris testified on Capitol Hill, “So long as the business model of everyone having a chance to speak and the possibility of it going viral to millions of people is the promise, we will each continue to be steered into a different rabbit hole of reality. At the end of the day, a business model that preys on human attention means that we are worth more as human beings when we are addicted, outraged, polarized, narcissistic and misinformed, since that means the business was successful at steering our attention using automation.”

INSTAGRAM VS REALITY

The Metaverse Matrix

In a piece for The Atlantic, Caleb Madison reflects on the well known movie from 1999, The Matrix. He says, “The Matrix became shorthand for the uncanny feeling that our media-saturated, hyper-commercialized, machine-mediated culture had alienated us from some primal human reality.” And, while he says that much of the message and metaphors from the film are still relevant, “no concept has carried more linguistic weight than the red and blue pills, which can either solidify your new radical awareness or send you back into ignorant, narcotic bliss.”

And with Zuckerberg investing over $50M to build out “The Metaverse”, a virtual reality wonderland (dystopia) , I can’t help but feel that the matrix is not some futuristic sci-fi fairy tale, but instead has become the water that we are all hypnotically unaware we are entirely immersed and swimming in, as our lives become fully dependent and entangled in one company. 

It’s important that we get eye to eye with the depth of this reliance:

With COVID still disrupting much of our travel and face to face time with loved ones, an enormous amount of our communication is happening digitally, and most of the platforms on which most of our communication is taking place are owned by Meta: Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp. Aside from maybe Zoom, Meta owns the bulk of how and where we are talking to one another.

And we know that much of this ‘communication’ on these apps is often just skimming content or arguing with our uncles or strangers. With social and political divides running deeper by the day, outrage abounds in the comment sections. Every time we open the app to either engage in or eat popcorn as we watch the dead-end bickering and bullying from the sidelines, engagement and the use of Meta-owned apps overall skyrocket. We’ve got to stay in the loop. And Meta owns the loop.

As we feel lonelier, more anxious, and worse about ourselves, we search for content in the Metaverse to help us escape from or diagnose and fix our lives. As we turn to content for solutions, we feel less present and become more reliant and addicted to the very machine that’s generating much of the problem in the first place.

In many ways the Great Resignation is a welcome and exciting revolution — an en masse dismissal of the worship of career success at all costs that is promised in the empty American Dream — and more people are leaving the 9-5 to become their own boss (June 2021 alone saw 4 million Americans quit their jobs). But as they start their own businesses, they increasingly rely on social media to market and sell their goods and services. Do they really work for themselves now, or do they work for Meta? Meta owns their entire customer base and dictates precisely how they market, based on what serves Meta the most.

And as we calcify into This Kind of Person and sink further into our own rabbit holes of reality, community, and content, our consumer profiles get more data points and the walls of our individual Metaverse become lined with advertisements selling us more ways to perform our identities while we thicken the pockets of the corporation telling us that’s exactly what we need to be happy. Meta owns our identities and our aspirations.

One company. (One man!) Has its hands in not only the majority of all (ALL) online communication, but our own livelihoods, our realities, our life aspirations, and our own sense of self. We should all be concerned, or at the very least interested, in this truth.

Adrienne LaFrance wisely shared, “The lesson for individuals is this: you must be vigilant about the informational streams you swim in, deliberate about how you spend your precious attention, unforgiving of those who weaponize your emotions and cognition for their own profit, and deeply untrusting of any scenario in which you’re surrounded by a mob of people who agree with everything you’re saying.”

Our Attention, Our Lives

It is my job to bring people into contact with the here and now, to intimately learn the power of their attention and teach them how to wield it. To help people take a studied look into their own mind, patterns, and choices— to work with their humanness and nature instead of against it, and to subsequently live more intentionally in a way that begets fulfillment and contentment. I am an advocate for true, holistic wellbeing— one that starts in our minds and radiates outward into our lives. 

How can I know what I know, and see what I see (both in my clients and online), and continue to participate in this psychological experiment to which none of us have agreed? History will not judge us kindly, and I am not sure I want collaboration with this system to be part of my own personal or professional legacy.

With Meta having such a firm hold on modern day marketing, this is not an easy decision, since my livelihood, in great part, depends on the social network. But its also because of this startling fact that I’m inclined to walk away. I don’t want to tangle my business and life even further into a corporation that so obviously works against all that I value personally.

I’m heartened seeing companies like Lush Cosmetics step away from these destructive platforms for similar reasons, even when they too, know their bottom line will take a ($13M) hit.  "In the same way that evidence against climate change was ignored and belittled for decades, concerns about the serious effects of social media are going largely ignored now," the company said in its press release.

Truthfully: how can we know what we know and carry on? What are we doing?

So what is the solution here? That’s the trillion dollar question, and congress and households alike are in the process of figuring out how to navigate this new challenge. This is a global issue that has countless arms and facets, and will take major efforts across all domains in order to establish a sustainable solution. I don’t have all the answers, and I won’t pretend to, but I know this:

Meta has known for some time the damage that it is doing to our world: both the world within and without. And with the release of The Facebook Papers, our intuitions and anecdotes have been confirmed— we too now have access to the same damning data. Demanding reform and regulation in this new modern territory is important.

But. But! Waiting for them to change so that we can continue happily along with our mindless scrolling, unbothered enough to even lift our eyes from the dancing faces and advertisements on our screens, is a grave forfeiture of our own agency.

Its easy to look out in the world and shake our head at “the culture”, without seeing that we are culture. What we see out there lives in us, somewhere. We breathe life into The Culture with each of our choices, with where we point our attention. How can we sit here and blame Meta for knowing what they know and carrying on with business as usual, while we are doing the exact same thing?

If we want this to change, if we want to reclaim our attention, our minds, our lives, our sovereignty, we have to acknowledge the role that we are playing in perpetuating this culture. And we do it every single time we pick up our phones and open the app.

We can opt out. There IS a universe outside of the Metaverse. We can choose the blue pill instead. But it might require, as Shor said, going against the social grain in a big way, and leaving behind this seductive but empty virtual reality, much of which, as we all know, seems like a necessity for our modern life. But is it a necessity? Truly? 

We must get to the heart of the matter here and ask ourselves, in the words of poet Uppalavanna, what we are really prepared to give up in order to be free?

Deleting Instagram (or just putting our phones down for one god forsaken moment) will mean more than FOMO as we choose the cultural road less traveled. It will also mean that we have to face ourselves.

We may have to look quietly into where the pull for persistent distraction and stimulation comes from. We may have to inquire into who we are beneath all of our ideas about who we are, and all we’ve been told we should be. We might have to learn how to stay here and now when we desperately want to run. We may have to look closely at our routines and the way we spend our time, and see that the safe harbor we are seeking in automation, outsourcing and running on autopilot is a trap: that not choosing is itself a choice. We might have to find real ways to express our values and to be of service in the world. We may even have to take pause from our to-do lists and schedules and busyness and just meet this moment as it is instead of attempting to fix it or prepare for a better one.

In the words of David Foster Wallace:

“In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t… If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. 

But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings. They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.”

Far be it from me to tell you, reader, what should and should not bring meaning and value to your life. This is yours to establish, and yours alone. But what I deeply hope for you is that, whatever you worship, you have made the conscious, intentional, and thoughtful decision to sit at that alter. 

Because if you haven’t, someone else has made that precious decision for you. And chances are increasingly good that that ‘someone’ is an app in your phone; an AI that knows you better than you know yourself; a corporation that is profiting handsomely from your sleepwalking.

In our life, although we tend to rally against this truth at all costs, the fact remains that there are very few things that we actually have control over. Where we put our attention is one of those things. It is extremely precious —it is difficult to exaggerate the ways this one choice determines the quality of our life. 

And on some level, I think we know this. We can intuit the salience of this finite mental resource, the power hiding in the choice we have in every Now we encounter.

In his book Four Thousand weeks, Oliver Burkman writes, “Most other resources on which we rely as individuals — such as food, money, electricity — are things that facilitate life, and in some cases, its possible to live without them, at least for a while. Attention, on the other hand, just is life: your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention. At the end of your life, looking back, whatever compelled your attention from moment to moment is simply what your life will have been.”

My sincerest hope is that we can recognize, with striking clarity, the ways we have forfeited this singular power and the profound price we are paying for it— the ways in which it has snuck its influence into our mind and life, and the ways in which we continue to let it. I hope that we bring some awareness to what we are choosing to hand our attention over to every moment, every day. That we see clearly what we are really in search of. That we bring careful intention to what we worship. That we see that we are so much more than a label, an idea, or a profile, and that we aren’t, and have never been, even in the slightest, broken.

Reclamation of our attention — our lives — is available.

Can we be brave enough to establish contact with reality, with the earth below us, the sky above us, and the universe within us, outside of Instagram?

Can we be courageous enough to feel? To welcome and sit beside the fullness of our precious, complicated humanity— and everyone else’s? Can we trust that we have enough, that we are enough?

Can we experience this very moment, without eyes cast on a distant horizon, browsing for next? 

Can we be here, now?