(1)
And those humans did come unto the feed as unto a well, and drank deeply of its poison.
And the images passed before them like the faces of the dead, and none did they remember.
And they cried out for more and lo, it was given to them, measure pressed down and running over.
And the hunger remained.
My time is spent scrolling through the vast and hollow billboard lands of Instagram, when I awake, when I am winding down, in my would-be idle moments. Life spent during hours meant for nothing.
The time goes by quicker, and I lose my bearings for longer and longer periods of time until I, often by circumstance or necessity, regain consciousness and escape my pernicious mental captor.
My eyes burn slightly, my attention threadbare, my will to action frayed. Whatever desire or anxiety that brought me there in the first place has long since evaporated, replaced by dull static.
(2)
They saw the works of men made bright by artifice, and grew jealous, and called it inspiration.
And they worshipped the lives of others as gods upon high places.
But the gods were as hollow as gourds, and the high places were built upon nothing but bits and meaningless encodings.
The app fuels my internal mimetic flame, carrying me from thing to thing, person to person, envy from comparison, yearning from observation, sadness from fear.
People I do not know anymore wave across the void. They like my posts and I like theirs. We provide each other with mutual validation through our push notifications. Pings in the ether, calls for help, the sound of loneliness in digital dress.
(3)
The noise of the multitude did not cease.
And in their loneliness they drew closer to the fire, though it burned not, and gave no heat.
And the watchers grew weary, though their hands did not stop moving,
And the eyes of their children opened to light not made by sun nor moon.
And the old ways passed into shadow, and no man grieved them.
This is all a very dramatic way of saying that I deleted Instagram. I'm in the process of deleting other accounts too. This is not a virtue signaling post about the ills of social media, but represents my anecdotal experience and feelings about my own usage of it.
The profile may be gone, the app may be uninstalled, but some patterns remain. I still seek out the anesthetic of mindless scrolling and seek to soothe my anxiety through distant pixels rendered on my screen.
On the other hand...
There is a lot of time that didn't exist before. There's no longer a deluge of information and stimuli that I'm obligated to subject myself to. There's more mental space and less overhead. My anxieties have latched on to other things, because there's not enough substance here anymore.
I have realized how distracted I really was, how much I wasn't paying attention to, how much I let slip, and how far I strayed from my goals and values. It took traveling to another country (in the Middle East no less) to understand that I didn't need any such thing to survive, and that this impersonal form of validation had become meaningless to me.
It has renewed my will to action, because I have the time and energy to do so now. My natural tendencies are not sapped by a feed of endless distraction. Things feel a bit more real, and a bit harder sometimes, because I can't escape into this fantasy of "social" technology, and I can't seek out easy validation anymore.
I realize how hollow my interactions online were. Sharing memes and short clips is not real socializing and it saps your desire to pursue that real socialization. I am more intentional about making plans with friends now. I have a good sense of who I value and want to be around, who I don't know, and who I don't care for personally. And I know the difference between these three people.
I intend to erode and unlearn the pattern that I have built up with this app and many others: that of anesthetizing myself willingly. I don't blame the "algorithm" (I'm a software engineer, there are many algorithms, there is no one Algorithm to rule them all). It's your fault for using these apps. Own up to it and have the chutzpah to make your own choice. That doesn't mean you need to delete it necessarily, but I did. That was the only thing that worked for me.