Is scrolling ruining your life?
After relocating back to Surrey I excitedly decided that I would create food recipe reels whilst seeking employment. Upon creating I realised (again) that my feed seemed to be a cooking network, a splendid one too. However, I noticed that I was spending more time than I had anticipated and gave myself a serious reality check. I felt as though I was performing to maintain prosocial relationships because they happen to be non existent in my real life. I felt that my loneliness was creeping up on me making me more depressed because I didn’t have the perfect presentation. Additionally, I needed to focus on more important things and the perfect opportunity to delete Instagram came just when it was having some outage issues. I knew that I needed to find something to replace this “hobby” of using using social media with other things such as going to the gym, boosting my imaan really trying to reset my life.
I realised that attention given to it alongside the emotional and the cognitive engagement with it actually was taking a lot of energy from me, even sleep, sports and healthy food can't keep up with that.
I would class myself as creative and Instagram had been the default way to find out about sharing food recipes, exchange likes and comments with like minded individuals, check any upcoming events, see what friends are working on, share your portfolio, etc. It used to be kind of chill and actually useful . Of course, seeing people posting about their perfect life, perfect body, perfect career etc sometimes caused insecurity but I could deal with that, I'm an adult. It felt like the problems of early social media were just slightly amplified versions of normal social problems like bullying, bragging, excluding etc.
What I wasn’t able deal with was as a creator, is the way Instagram now did not even want me to see posts from those who I know and have met. Instead it just wants me to absorb an endless stream of content made by individuals who do not know me. A lot of which is genuinely disturbing, or at the very least designed to make me angry, paranoid and upset so I engage more.
I also hate how idea of theft is just completely normalised. Like it’s not even framed as theft, it’s just part of the culture. For example, if you see a funny meme or a video, the next time you log in you’re going to see it eight more times from eight different accounts. Not variations on it, not riffing on it, just the exact same thing. And the first one you saw probably wasn’t even the first version either. I know idea theft has always been a part of social media and that part of putting stuff out there into the world means giving up a bit of control about what happens with it. You can’t be precious about your posts. But over the last couple years it feels like “don’t rip off other people’s ideas” has become a fringe position that most social media users, especially Instagram, would genuinely struggle to understand. They don’t feel bad about ripping someone off and don’t understand why they even would. I guess they see it as covering a song, even though it’s not really the same thing
There is a lot of useful content for sure but that app became a performative app where nothing is private anymore and you start to perform for audience than for yourself. It’s like having a house but there’s cameras all around it that your neighbours can look at. That’s why I noticed since I recently went on holiday. I feel that we are witnessing the death of Instagram. I mean the app isn’t like, losing its users, I mean that it changed drastically for what it’s made for. If you are umming and arring about to delete, deactivate or delete the app here are some reasons of why you should (subject of you being over 16 years old:
1) Posting is a humiliation ritual
Majority of users don’t post anymore because it feels a bit embarrassing now. I know they said post whatever you want, but it’s not that simple. Even for close friends stories when you post you feel like them not liking it is either they just didn’t like what you posted whether it’s a dump or what or most probably they haven’t seen it because it’s been buried in suggested posts.
2) It’s trying too hard to become TikTok
The reels page most often times are just like recycled TikTok videos.
3) It defines your character
Like a resume, whatever you post, share or repost on your page represents everything about you, people can envy you for having a good time not knowing the full story which is sad but this is the sad reality that we live in. Choosing what to show signifies how you want to be known. In my case, I have 2 real friends who barely post and people who view your stories want to know they see you.
So unlike before where we post regularly trying to build our Instagram feed like a portfolio, we still do build that portfolio but it’s a lot more curated now and I bet if Instagram brought back that feature where you can just post directly to your profile page, we might never see the light of day of our friends post on our feed unless we stalk their profiles.
To summarise:
Instagram has become a trap for us creators.
Here’s the cycle:
You spend hours editing a reel for me it was choosing the right song which went with the beat and even then people took that personal!
Instagram makes it visible it to 10% of your followers. If those few don’t instantly engage, your post dies.
Instagram nudges you telling you to “Boost this post to reach more people!”.
You may even gain new followers over the next couple of days.
But here’s the problem; those new followers are ALSO subject to the same 10% rule.
So no matter how much money you spend, you’ll never truly reach the audience you built. The system is rigged: they sell you followers you can’t actually access.
It’s like renting your own audience. You don’t own it.
TikTok gives every post a chance on the For You Page, and YouTube Shorts at least has long-term discovery and monetisation.
Personally, I can tell you that people seem to prefer the fantasy over the reality. Even when the fantasy is "shit." The fantasy can actually be worse than reality, but people still prefer the fantasy. It makes no logical or reasonable sense to me. Though, to be fair, they don't really understand the question because they are still in the fantasy. You may ask, "does it matter?" , "does knowing I may be in simulation change how I engage with my world?" Should I behave differently because I am in simulation? This is where I return to Nozick again, pointing out how people seem to prefer the fantasy over the reality. Given this observation, the answer seems to be "no, carry on as you've always done."
Social Media Ban for Under 16 ‘s
Recently, Starmer announced that there would be a social media ban for all teenagers under 16,with protections expected to come into force in Spring 2027. Sadly there is a well established secure, and blind (zero-knowledge) way of doing this but instead us it’s adults who will have to suffer and upload selfies or ID to some random company instead. Has the government ever considered "what if an adult signs in and gives their children the phones?", or “what if a child is shown another way like using the VPN?”.
It's media suppression, data control, and mass surveillance rolled into a nice neat excuse of "protecting the kids" from a system they helped facilitate. They don’t care about the negative impacts of social media, they actively use it to further their agendas to keep you distracted from the wealthy elite extracting as much data and wealth from everyone. Its a slippery slope, once you need ID for social media, you will need it for ANY major platform. That's a big win for corporations. Its just not right. Parents should be the ones controlling what their kids look at not the government.
Sooner or later we will have the most oppressive regulation of any western nation for internet use and before you know it and one will full be needing a government license to even get a broadband connection installed. I suspect there will be dictatorial regimes looking at this and thinking to themselves they also want this kind of control.