The Tamagotchi That Won’t Die
A Decade of Instagram and Self-Consumption
From Dagny Tepper, Mommy of Pilot Magazine <3
I’ve decided to start this think piece by getting some of the dirtiest components out of the way. The thoughts that, if I neatly weave them into the rest of the essay, will just become diluted as my embarrassment actualizes. I’ve ordered them from: ‘weird and superficial’ to ‘I am a short-circuiting Cyborg’.
If I don’t share my creative work on Instagram, how will I be able to have a successful career?
If I don’t share personal milestones on Instagram, how will I feel as accomplished?
If I don’t post photos of myself, how will people know I’m better looking than I was in high school?
If I don’t occasionally act non-chalant on Instagram, how will people know I’m normal?
If I don’t chronicle my life on Instagram, how will I still feel like I exist?
While I’m out here laying it all out, I’ll also put forward that it feels dumb for me after a writing hiatus to write an article about Instagram. I’m not a hot-internet-writer with ascii art in my bio. How are they so hot after 10 hours of screen time? And I’m not someone who knows their way around New York City and reads celebrity memoirs. Or a vlogger or a psychologist or a social media life coach in California, bless ‘em. At the risk of sounding like a dickhead or holier than thou, social media, from the outside, isn’t even a huge part of my life. I deleted TikTok a few years ago. I tell people it was because it made me depressed (true) but it was because I had to get over an old flame who posted a lot (sigh). I post on Instagram a handful of times a year at this point. I don’t use Facebook at all (a reality which would give my teenage self vertigo) or any of the other stuff. Never wanted BeReal. I don’t have dating apps (a rant for a different time) which is basically social media. So that brings me back to Instagram.
I’m writing this because of, not despite, the fact that I’ve grown out of social media. It’s the disinterest that interests me, the passivity that scares me, and the lethargy that makes this different from silly chronically online content. Moreover, as you can tell from the weird forgive me, father bit up top, this story isn’t really setting up for a happy ending. Just fairly disturbing admissions that were lost in grey area, brought to surface by someone who you’d think had never seen the sun. At least that’s the energy I’m channeling right now.
But I’m so tired of going on Instagram. I believe that it’s actually dying – so avidly that I’ve thought about how things, mostly my creative projects, will adapt. For most of us, our brains now metabolize the dopamine rush from posting so quickly that it can’t be defined as a “happy” experience in any measure of the word. But sometimes, I still see my life through an Instagram post. I think about an experience through how it might show up on Instagram. Ooof. I want to articulate all this as accurately as I can, so against these dark truths I’m going to be totally real. It probably was at some point, but Instagram is not my first thought. I’m a present person, we’re not part-computer yet. As I’ve come into adulthood I’ve only gotten better at disconnecting. Vacationing without posting (nobel prize?), not taking my phone out of my bag at a gig and, most pertinent to this conversation, I don’t Instagram story special moments (you know the ones – everyone’s looking wholesome, at the end someone puts on a lil show for the camera) like I would’ve in college.
The crux of this is, being on Instagram isn’t the problem. Nor do I find it that relevant. This is the unnerving part. That’s why I can write this article instead of a hot-internet-writer. That’s why somewhere deep down we’re all hot-internet-girl. Or the mom watching birthdays through a camera lens. Or my straight male counterpart, with an internet presence he swears is so quirky, even though he always knows the pop culture gossip. That sort of brings me to a fundamental corner of this conversation. Instagram’s offerings are obviously dystopic-ly wide-ranging. There is news and life and death and pop culture and inspiring artists and new music and good memes and bad memes. Unable to distinguish between learning and indoctrination, unable to keep up with creation versus consumption, we’ve just adapted to do our best. But, within that ecosystem, you somehow have us as media too, us – growing up. I was thirteen years old when I posted my first Instagram. I don’t remember what the picture was, but I remember the culture around it. How there were already rules; spoken and unspoken. But I can say at that time that the problem was being on Instagram, not being off. A dynamic I much prefer to what I’m experiencing now. For the purposes of this discussion, by being ‘on’ it, I’m referring to: posting enough to signal you’re still active.
It’s the mental gymnastics of trying to be ‘off’ it– the feeling that always creeps up: I should have something to show for the last few months of my life. Which brings me to the money question, who’s the audience anymore? When I was in middle school, I’m sure it was about trying to impress the girls from the other schools, or post myself, still prepubescent ew, in a bikini for my crushes, or showing off that I went somewhere like Florida. Again, a dynamic I much prefer to what I’m experiencing now. It’s weird actually – maybe it’s delusional, but rather than trying to impress an audience, I see the ‘audience’, everyone else on there, as just as trapped as me. Kind of like in the hunger games or something, where people start making the most of the attention because they have to.
I’m not even concerned anymore with convincing others I’m living a great life, but convincing myself. Looking at a well-rounded set of activities, people, accomplishments, places, I can feel like I’m doing a good job out there. To package parts of myself, people I love, chapters, experiences, trips, into neat little boxes (literally) until I can see myself through a lens that satisfies a desire deep down. At this point, Instagram for me is this compulsion to log, actualize, and digest my life. In other words, I use Instagram to consume my own self. Ugh. What the fuck.
Valiant users breaking the fourth wall
Don’t worry – I think that (and the Hunger Games reference) is the most dramatic I’ll get. I’m not adding to the sea of articles about social media addiction just to sound like someone’s crazy grandma. And anyways, my point is that there are grey areas. Even just now, I opened up my Instagram profile and experienced a wave of relief. Not because I’m that addicted (lol). But because this evil I’ve been interrogating, in actuality, only presented me with colors I love, memories that are special to me, scenes that make me feel good about myself. Phew, maybe it’s not so bad. In fact, there’s a part of all of this to me that feels like getting to customize your very own club penguin character. A warm little, ‘hey that’s me!’ – sending memes between friends like the way you’d stand aimlessly in each others' igloos. Even more pure, Instagram can be an evolved virtual ‘show and tell’ from Kindergarten. I really do get that warm feeling deep down when I post a photo of the latest issue of my magazine.
In 2020 during Covid, I looked around and realized I finally had the time to start a magazine. After planning and building the website for a few months (which I luckily saw as a much more important foundation than IG), I turned to Instagram to ‘launch’. I actually wanted to hold off even longer, but I had a friend who told me she was inspired by my plans to start a magazine and she started her new magazine’s Instagram that same week. It was nerve wracking, but motivating – and it would foreshadow the dependencies many contemporary creative projects have on Instagram, including mine. Situated in another grey area, I can’t take social media for granted after the people it led me to. Not long after a ‘Join The Team’ post on Instagram, even though the team was literally just me, the first group of us working on Pilot collaborated across oceans, time zones, a global pandemic building something out of my wildest dreams. The majority of them are still on the team to this day, and now friends. Not only were we growing up on Instagram, we were growing up together.
So all I know is, lodged at the crux of the contemporary professional creative experience and my personal life, Instagram always seems to be there. And I don’t quite know how to navigate that. Everyone is different, but I derive a lot of meaning in my life from change – dynamism – letting go – new beginnings – new forms of expression. I also crave tactility, sensory experiences, analog media. Why wouldn’t I delete the app and call it a day? Well, my magazine really does prevent that at this point. But pretending that’s not a factor, and in the case of the average user: with a live profile and no me to be found, it feels a little eerie. Like when a diary stops in the middle of a random sentence. Why not delete my personal account? My perfectly curated digital scrapbook of the last decade of my life…eek. But, one day I probably will. I’ll explore remedies that others swear by, like deactivation, a finsta, or a separate portfolio account for my profession. Although the idea of creating a new account, to solve the problem of dependency on an old account, renders me more spooked than ever. Nevertheless, I still think Instagram will die. I guess I just never saw myself wishing death upon the cute latte art app.
I told you this wouldn’t have a happy ending. But I will leave you with something. Of course, all this perception mumbo jumbo I’m on is a very old discussion. Think "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?". That’s the classic philosophical question about observation and perception, presenting the possibility of unperceived existence. While of course, like many of the questions around social media, there is a scientific answer, that hasn’t stopped us from reflecting and garnering perspectives about it. I’d like to encourage more conversations around social media – how it’s come to interfere with the way we understand one another, and ourselves. For generations, people have found it pretty weird to grapple with perception alone. Now enter: babysitting whole extra digital existences like Tamagotchis all our adult lives? I know it’s sucking the soul out of me, but I seem to still have plenty soul where that came from. Maybe I’m not a Cyborg afterall.
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