“Social media makes me forget that I have hobbies.”//“Literally nobody cares about my Instagram.”

I spoke to some people about Instagram and posting. Here's what surfaced.

Hello dear reader,

I’ve been working on this newsletter for a while, circling around it, really, and I’m beyond excited to finally share it with you. It started with a few comments that stuck with me: someone telling me I looked very comfortable in front of a camera, another saying, “Another selfie? You really do post a lot.” Neither was meant unkindly. But still, it made me a little self conscious. They felt like ouch moments.

So I started asking questions.

What compels us to post, especially selfies? When do we do it, and what are we really trying to communicate? Is it about validation, performance, control, expression or all of these things?

What’s your relationship with social media, dear reader?

Do you post often? What do you post? When, and… why?

How do you feel afterwards?

One of the first studies I stumbled upon talked about personality traits and posting behaviour. It basically said that extroverted people tend to post selfies for attention, for communication, or just to archive moments, while neurotic individuals are more hesitant, because they don’t want to come across as attention-seeking. I found that kind of funny, because it made sense in an annoying way. The more you overthink how you’ll be perceived, the less likely you are to post anything, especially if it shows your face.

But that’s not always true either. I know people who are confident, out-spoken, at ease in groups and never post. And I know shy, introverted people who are super active online. So it’s not a fixed rule.

For me, the honest truth is: I post the most when I’m not feeling great.

Not necessarily sad or crying, but just… not grounded.

When I don’t feel particularly attractive or interesting or full of life offline, I end up reaching for the dopamine online. I’ll post a cute outfit, a mirror selfie, a coffee, a sunset. It doesn’t really make me feel better, but I think on some low level, it’s like I’ve tricked the algorithm, or maybe the world, into thinking I’m doing fine.

And sometimes that illusion, that little performance, is enough to get me through.

It’s complicated though. People post for validation, sure. But the deeper I looked into it, and spoke to others about it, the clearer it became that posting (especially selfies) is also about things like connection, loneliness, desire, boredom, identity, even ritual.

Through Instagram I asked some people to speak to me about this topic. This was super fun, very insightful for myself as well. Based on my interview notes I asked ChatGPT to make me a diagram and a visual map of some kind, but it couldn’t manage it, not without a handful of bizarre spelling mistakes. So I made a few myself instead :)))

A friend I interviewed told me that she mostly posts when she’s alone. Her boyfriend travels a lot for work, and in those quiet moments (not being able to speak to him face to face), instead of texting him something random, she’ll post it on her Close Friends story. I guess Close Friends Stories aren’t about being seen by everyone. Sometimes it’s about recreating a sense of being with someone, someone in particular, even if only virtually. Curated intimacy, or something like that.

She has a totally different energy on her public story, she said: more curated, more polished, more “I’m doing great.” But Close Friends; that’s where it’s real.

She also made a great point about the algorithm.
Post a selfie = 7x more engagement.
Post a landscape = no engagement :(((((
Couple content? Goldmine!!!!!
So yeah, we’re awarded for showing our faces.

And then there’s a downside. She told me:
“When I post a lot, I get this overexposed feeling, like I’ve revealed too much of myself. That’s when I delete the app. But it’s hard to stay off, too, especially when it’s your main way of staying connected, or finding out about things happening around you.”

It’s part of our social glue, which is one of the reasons why it’s hard to go completely social media off-grid as so to speak.

She said something else that I found SO relatable:

“Social media makes me forget that I have hobbies.”

That one hit. We get used to instant feedback; a like, a fire emoji, a heart-eye. And suddenly it’s hard to sit with a quiet hobby, something that takes time and gives back nothing right away. Painting. Reading. Writing. These are things of which the process cannot be rushed.

Still, maybe posting is its own kind of art?? I don’t know. If we do it consciously, perhaps. If we think of it, not as a desperate plea to be seen, but as a quiet way of witnessing ourselves.
Clarissa Pinkola Estés, in Women Who Run With the Wolves, talks about soul retrieval; about finding and reclaiming parts of ourselves we’ve lost or silenced. Maybe a selfie can be that, too. A symbolic act of saying:
I exist. I’m here. Look.

She also writes about liminal spaces. These are the messy in-between zones of transformation. And honestly, when I think about when I’ve posted certain things: after romantic turbulence, after a new haircut, after moving cities, it has felt like a kind of ritual. Like I was saying very, very indirectly and definitely not very consciously:
Witness me. I’m not who I was yesterday.

But of course. There remains a shadow side. The part of us that posts for validation. For revenge. For comparison. For control.

Erving Goffman (sociologist, dramaturgical theory guy) would say we’re performing a curated version of ourselves: front stage and back stage. I think that’s true. But I also think we’re still figuring out the rules of this stage.

Selfies don’t just document mood, they shape it. Especially post-breakup, someone says, the stories become louder, bolder. “The classic trope,” a respondent calls it: showing off your freedom, your glow-up, your bikini photos.

“Hoping a certain someone sees it. Even when you know they won’t.”

One person I spoke to said she reorganizes her entire feed based on mood. Her “dark era” demanded a new palette, new tone. She eventually changed it back. She says it’s not fake. Just polished.

“Nobody wants to see me cry in bed anyway.”

For creators and artists, it’s even trickier. Someone described the heartbreak of posting her artwork, her actual creative labour, only to see it swallowed by the algorithm. Hardly any likes, no reach.

“It makes me feel like my art doesn’t matter,” she says. “So then I just post a selfie again. It’s fucked up.”

She tells me “Instagram is both my portfolio and a trap.”

A friend of hers, she tells me, deletes and reposts stories weeks or months later, just to maintain a perfectly ordered Highlight reel. Wow. The work…

The contradictions pile up. We say it’s just an app. One respondent remarked “nobody really cares,” and yet we post; again and again. There’s this longing to be present while performing, to be real while curating.

Posting is, of course, part of postmodern visual culture. The metaverse blurs the lines between what’s real and what’s representation. One respondent put it simply:

“My Instagram isn't fake. I’ve done all the things I post. I just wish I could feel those moments more fully when they happen.”

Philosopher Jean Baudrillard might have called those posts hyperreal: images of ourselves that never quite existed, but somehow feel more vivid, more ideal, more us than our everyday selves.

We become spectators of our own lives; watching our stories back, analysing our feeds, wondering if the “you” that you perform online is more admired, more in control, more whole:

“I watch my own stories the most. Sometimes I feel confident, but other times I cringe and delete them. Still, I keep posting”

And maybe that's because posts, whether selfies or landscapes or screenshots of songs, carry encrypted emotional messages. Roland Barthes once described photographs as containing both studium — the general meaning, the shared context — and punctum, the detail that wounds, surprises, haunts (evokes emotional response). The studium of an Instagram story might be: “I’m out tonight, feeling myself.” But the punctum might be the glance away from the camera, someone’s eye bags, the timing of the post, the fact that it was watched 37 times by the person you didn’t want to care about anymore.

Coming back to what I said earlier, if it is stage, Instagram and social media more generally, we’re still figuring out the rules of this stage. While one language might define it as curation, another might define it more as negotiating; negotiating with the algorithms, with followers’ expectations, and with themselves.

Personally, I’ll put a little more thought into posting next time. Enlightened selfies…

Till next time.

Love,

Naomi