We have Instagram now. There’s no need to write 10,000 words just to post a picture of the omelette I made for dinner. But to some extent, it feels like we aren’t connecting — just displaying what we’re capable of doing… or more likely, affording. I’m trying not to fall into that trap. Even though I sometimes enjoy other people’s reels and photos of their lives, it feels cringe if I do that too. Because I’m cringe. So I end up using my social media to post memes that may have been kinda insulting. This foul mouth of mine. I know.
So, while doomscrolling and avoiding sleep, I discovered I was following 975 accounts! What the hell was that? I checked those accounts and saw foods I no longer want to eat, paintings that are no longer my style, humor that’s no longer funny, and things that simply don’t interest me anymore. In short, I was following all kinds of people whose content wasn’t even relatable to me. To make it worse, their posts rarely even showed up on my feed, since the algorithm no longer prioritizes the people you actually follow.
I’ve also noticed a trend on social media where people use it as an emotional dumpster — a place to unload whatever they no longer want to carry alone: trauma, sadness, happiness, ego, all compressed into a few lines, sometimes just an emoji. We don’t give enough room to explore and examine our emotions, our reactions, and the reasoning behind them. It’s no surprise our attention spans have become as short as our captions. At some point, social media stopped being a place to share and became a place to trauma-bond. Only a few accounts use it wisely, encouraging others to turn their pain into wisdom instead.
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We no longer live in an era where a nice piece of clothing has to be hand-sewn, like in the novel Little House on the Prairie. That limitation has since turned into something else: the burden of abundance. Thanks to Amazon and the like, everything is just a click away, so we’ve traded one problem for another — clutter.
I often look around my apartment and notice how much I own but never use. I crossed the whole continent years ago with only a medium-sized suitcase, and now I’d need a whole shipping container to move my stuff. I don’t have a big wardrobe, but I do have furniture, a big collection of cooking pans as if I had four stomachs like a cow, a piano, two guitars, tons of books, and more art supplies than I know what to do with. There was a period where shopping became a way to fill a void in my heart. And now, I’m left living with the aftereffects.
It’s strange, isn’t it? We live in an era where things can be acquired so easily — either because of technology, or because someone else, somewhere else, is paying the real price for us. And instead of living wisely, we tend to just follow our impulses and live recklessly, even while knowing that the Earth and the future generations will be the ones paying for the decisions we make today. I’m writing this because I know I’m not the only one with a clutter problem.
Back to my Instagram story. The moment I saw that number — 975 — I started scrolling, unfollowing every account I no longer resonated with, until I got down to 615. That took me about an hour. If I can’t declutter the physical things, at least I can declutter my social media. Let’s start from the easiest.
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I want to close this with some kind of resolution. Honestly, writing this post already feels like a small revolution for me — forcing myself to sit down and write this much, even if most of it is just ranting.
So let me sit with that for a second.
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Still thinking...
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After thinking it over, there’s really only one resolution that fits this whole decluttering-and-doomscrolling problem...
Stay away from that phone.
If I can’t even remember the video I saw five minutes ago, I don’t see why I should be in that alternate universe.
So, with this post, I’m setting a rule for myself: no social media for a week.
Let’s see what happens.
*fingers crossed*
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