A war, a Stanley cup, and a gender reveal walk into a bar

These things have nothing in common except for making me wonder: What's keeping me on Instagram?

Let’s run a little experiment.

I will open the Instagram app on my phone. Scroll through the first ten posts in my feed, then list their subject matter sequentially.

. . .

Ready? It’s a doozy:

1. Seating chart graphic for the Real Housewives of Salt Lake City reunion taping (Monica has the seat next to Andy)

2. Ad for sweaters (now 30% off, still eye-poppingly expensive)

3. Photo of friend’s kid at a football game

4. A think piece about the war in Gaza.

5. Advice meme about toxic work cultures and severe burnout

6. Ad for bed sheets

7. Influencer shopping haul featuring holiday dresses from Shopbop

8. Carousel of photos exploring Princess Diana’s final year (a promotion for the new season of The Crown)

9. Ad for fancy body soap

10. Quote about aging and missing the younger version of yourself, published by an online women’s magazine

This is…quite a mix.

Maybe it’s the intensity of the news this year; maybe it’s the changing landscape amongst DTC advertising and influencers with it; maybe it’s my own boredom. But last month, I had a striking if not completely obvious revelation: my brain—and yours, for that matter—isn’t wired to handle the scroll-switching between humorous, serious, contemplative, outrageous, repulsive, joyous, and coveting.

Our brains are wired for story. Good story. After all, it’s part of what makes us human. A great narrative through-line helps us make sense of history, of life, of each other. Story makes your favorite novel propulsive, and a new miniseries bingeworthy. But Instagram does not give good story. (Despite, ironically, heavily featuring a product called Stories.)

What it does do is feed us lots of potentially good stories alongside very uninteresting ones, in a short amount of time. You already know the result: we scroll away, searching in vain for a (self-curated) narrative through-line. But when I’m supposed to feel ten different emotions across ten different posts, the reality is it’s very hard to feel anything at all.

Here’s something: I’ve had the above conversation with no less than three friends in the last couple of weeks, and each voiced the same numbness. And interestingly, everyone put forth their own solutions.

One friend admired writer Emma Gannon’s approach: she follows no one. (The app, then, is simply a place for her to showcase her own stuff, and consume no one else’s, which I’m pretty sure is the definition of baller.)

She wrote about the afternoon in which she unfollowed everyone from Instagram earlier this summer:

The relief was instant. I wanted (no, needed) to clean my brain out. I wanted to feel new again; re-born, starting from scratch. New me, new outlook. I needed a digital cleanse. I felt like Marie Kondo on mushrooms. I was lying on a white fluffy cloud staring up at the sky, my world opening up again.

Of the after, she reflected:

I am glad to have purged myself of the former digital world I created. I needed to get rid of everything. If I want to continue to create, to write, to make work I’m proud of, I simply cannot consume what 1,000+ people are doing on a daily basis.

Another friend told me she had a finsta, created purely for her own visual gratification. None of her friends know about it (I didn’t ask for her username, because I knew she’d demure even if I tried.) “I only follow art accounts on it,” she told me, “And when I open it up and all I see is art, it makes me so happy.”

But do the ads interspersed within the feed ruin the experience? I asked. After all, how could a feed full of paintings NOT lose their resonance if, like, laundry detergent ads popped up in between?

No, she replied, because the ads were related to the accounts she follows, or were surprisingly well-curated to her interests.

The approach sounds promising, but for me, switching back and forth between accounts—even with the dangling carrot of content I want to see—feels like an insurmountable roadblock.

(Yeah. You don’t have to say it, I already know. If I’m using words like insurmountable roadblock as they relate to tapping a couple buttons to switch accounts, the universe is clearly telling me: This here is no place for you. And the fact that this post in and of itself is a recap of all the ways friends and I have conversed about how to make this stupid platform work for us illuminates the writing that has been on the wall, in black permanent ink, for a couple of years. #ItsTheAppDummy)

And yet. AND YET.

I opined to both women that my dream flex would be to unfollow every last person on Instagram and—in a move that isn’t surprising if you’ve already made note of the content atop my feed—follow Bravo accounts exclusively .

Yes, it’s true. This is me. I am that person. Hello.

In a sea of bleh, Bravo accounts are my one source of joy on Instagram, an oasis of happy rabbit holes and actual LOL moments in my week, my lone raison d’être on Instagram. I can get my news elsewhere. My prose, even my photography fix, too. I’d be hard pressed to watch a scand(ov)al play out anywhere but Instagram.

But really, it all begs the question I alluded to before: if this once delightful app has devolved into something we feel annoyed towards at best and indifferent towards at worst (having no feeling being perhaps worse than having a negative one); if scant joy is to be squeezed from it no matter how many thumb scrolls…why can’t we quit it? And in this moment of total narrative chaos across all our feeds, is a reckoning afoot, with more and more of us, finally, definitively, over it?

I’d love for you to share: What are the first ten posts in YOUR feed? (Triple bonus points if there actually IS a story between them.)

Extra, Extra.

Happy Tuesday, and thanks for reading. Here are a few things I read and enjoyed over Thanksgiving weekend:

• Why does the Internet tell us to ‘Raise Good Humans’? A great essay from Brooding columnist Kathryn Jezer-Morton.

• If you enjoyed Emma Gannon’s essay about why she unfollowed everyone across social media (linked above), you’ll also enjoy her recent reflections on A Year of Change. Wonderful to read in this season of endings and traditions and rebirths.

• When the whole “only following Bravo accounts” thing doesn’t do the trick for a brain reboot, maybe this will—one journalist removed WiFi from his home completely. The results were, well, pretty good.

• And if I may undo all of my opining above, this from author Rob Walker: “I try not to spend too much time and energy demonizing technology. That’s because the truth is we can end up “in a state of suspended anxiety, regret, and worry” without any digital tools at all. Moreover, it’s fine to use the digital tools we have to recognize, recall and reflect on those “pretty good times,” even if that’s through belated evidence of “good times had.” You don’t need me to tell you that we are living in a very trying era; it can, in fact, be overwhelming. Whether this November 23 is, for you, an occasion for gathering and gratitude, or simply another Thursday, just try to give yourself room to have a good time — and to appreciate it while it’s happening.

Artwork: The collage at the top of this newsletter was created by me with actual screenshots from my Instagram feed and Stories; other images are from here, here, here, here and here.