No One Cares About Your Instagram
The illusion of being seen & the freedom of disappearing.
“Aspire to be different! Aspire to be someone who gets so caught up in the moment they forget to share it; who protects their personal life while everyone else hands theirs over so freely; who can see the value in a moment without needing strangers to validate it for them.” -Freya India
No one cares about your Instagram. No, really — they don’t.
Don’t believe me? Answer these honestly:
How much do you actually register what you’re seeing as you mindlessly tap through Instagram stories?
Does scrolling past someone else’s sunset satisfy you more than stepping outside to see one with your own eyes?
When you comment on someone’s post, how often are you genuinely engaging with what they shared — and how often are you repeating the same generic compliments because it feels socially expected?
It was freeing to realize that no one cared about the aesthetic perfection of my Instagram feed as much as I did. Once I understood that, deleting felt obvious. I used to obsess over whether a post’s cover matched my feed, whether the brightness and saturation were tweaked just right, and take fifty near-identical photos of the same concert stage chasing the perfect angle.
Until I admitted to myself how little I actually cared about anyone else’s Instagram posts. I reasoned: if I didn’t care about what people were posting, other people probably didn’t care about what I was, either.
Let me be clear: caring about the person behind the posts and caring about the posts themselves are two very different things. Caring about a person means getting out of bed and knocking on their door when you know they’ve had a rough day. It means calling them for a long, honest life update that goes beyond anything you’d see on their feed. You can care for someone with your entire being — and care about the intricate details of what they’re up to — and not give a damn about the hours of effort that went into their carefully packaged, mass-distributed Cabo dump.
“The 10-photo carousel of an experience, curated for the world, leaves out the vibrant, human details I only get by picking up the phone and asking about it.”
I used to love seeing friends’ comments light up my notifications when I’d finally perfect a new post. The onslaught of compliments felt, of course, wonderful.
Deleting Instagram meant yanking out the IV drip of affirmation. I realized my comment section looked like everyone else’s. I began to view it as nothing more than a game — performative, impersonal, and transactional. Friendship, it turns out, isn’t measured in emojis or one-word affirmations of attractiveness.
Instagram is built to make you feel followed. After hitting upload, we spend the day refreshing, waiting, watching for the wave of likes and comments to roll in. If you go too long without posting, your brain starts craving the dopamine hit again, nudging you to capture something worth praise at the next chance you get. We convince ourselves that people will truly miss us if we stop sharing every aspect of our lives.
But the truth is simple: you’re probably not being watched as closely as you think.
How much do you really have to care in order to post the same rehearsed set of hyperbolic adorations on all of your friends’ posts? Do you even look at their Spring break dump for more than 10 seconds before letting them know that you “WERE WAITING FOR THIS ONEEEE”? Were you, actually?
The video below is just one example illustrating how absurdly robotic these rituals have become — we care so little that we now need help sounding like we do.
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
Final questions:
Would you really notice if someone stopped appearing on your feed at all? Scrolling, and scrolling, and scrolling — would you even register that one person is suddenly gone?
If you stopped appearing on other people’s feeds, would they notice that you were gone?
Since deleting my Instagram, I do notice when I miss a friend. In order to know what they’re up to, I have to go out of my way to ask. I prefer that; especially knowing that a 10-photo carousel of an experience, curated for the world, leaves out the vibrant, human details I only get by picking up the phone and asking about it.
I became free when I decided to live for myself instead of for my feed. As intoxicating as they feel, likes and comments don’t love you back.
But your real friends might — if you call them.
Founded in 2025, Reconnect Stanford is a Stanford student-led movement & non-profit dedicated to helping people step away from addictive platforms and toward meaningful connection, time, and attention. We build community around social media sobriety through stories, support for students who delete, peer-to-peer mentorship with middle and high schoolers, and events where peers disconnect together.
To learn more and support our cause, visit reconnectstanford.org. To submit a guest piece, email reconnectstanford@gmail.com
About the author: Truitt Flink is the co-founder and President of Reconnect Stanford. Raised in the Bay Area and Austin, TX, she is a second-year design student at Stanford University. She deleted her social media accounts in 2024.