How Instagram Is Spoiling Your Relationships?
We’re friends of the platform more than people.
“ I feel blah these days.”
“Why babe?” replied my best friend.
“I don’t know my entire life has turned upside down by this lockdown.”
I eagerly waited for her reply. Waiting for some cajoling or at least some validation.
After 3 minutes, my phone vibrated, and I received a meme from her.
I double-tap, not knowing what else to say.
I was vulnerable a second ago; how do I laugh at this meme?
She sends me another video of a stranger. I don’t know what to do about it.
I double-tap and leave the app.
Memes Over Vulnerability
If you use IG regularly, I am sure it’s happened to you once or maybe multiple times.
That was the 10th time my vulnerable text got unnoticed.
I don’t blame them. I am guilty of doing it unintentionally too. But the amount of time I have been at the receiving end is staggering and made me stop sharing my feelings over IG.
It’s painful when you share a piece of your life, and it gets lost in the sea of memes. People don’t even realize how it’s impacting their relationships.
Ever since Instagram became mainstream and the primary source of connection with my friends, I saw a decline in our relationship.
My friends stopped using Whatsapp or FaceTime. By adding voice notes and video features, IG replaced all of our previous channels of communication.
It made our friendship lose in over-sharing memes and reels repurposed from TikTok videos. Weekly calls became weekly texts.
And then those weekly texts became monthly check-ins before they disappeared from your primary list to the general one. So the last few days on Instagram, I was double-tapping whatever I was sent often without watching or reading it.
Haha became the only verbal communication we had in those sharing contests.
How Many Loops Can You Have At Once?
It was not only the memes but how the app functions.
When you are connected with so many of your friends from all walks of life, you tend to have multiple conversations; you’re supposed to be on various tangents. And all of this takes place when your feed is already providing dopamine shots one after another.
You receive a text, you receive a meme, or you review a celebrity cheating, all while trying to keep that conversation and to keep an eye on how many likes your recent post has garnered.
The mind is not still. It has become a simulation yo-yo, and no matter how hard you try to keep up, you fail to keep up with everything.
The human mind is not built to entertain so many loops. Research done at the University of Oregon suggests that the human brain has a built-in limit on the number of discrete thoughts it can entertain at one time.
You may feel invincible to challenge your mind by engaging in endless loops and multitasking, but it’s affecting your brain efficiency can lead to short-term memory loss.
Neuroscience suggests that switching between tasks drains your cognitive resources and takes up to 40% longer to finish a task.
If so many things are happening with your brain, how will you remember what your best friend was telling you about anyway?
You’re A Bait
When you’ve been bombarded with so much content and over, simulation becomes the new normal.
Most of us don’t realize how we become bait to these apps instead of being their master. The algorithm shows us what we’re interested in, and the cycle of getting the content we can’t enough of keeps going.
We become so engrossed in the fake world of IG wasteland that we ignore the ground reality. Capitalism encaves us into believing that we need the new foundation and those new shoes to feel our best, and we forget to check the unread messages waiting for us in our inbox.
Seeing a couple of memes and haha-ing gives a sense of pseudo connection when in reality we know nothing about our closest friends or rather used to closest friends.
Post IG Relationships
After seeing the impact of social media on my friendship and mental health, I decided to quit IG in March.
The months that came after were peaceful. I could see myself thinking clearly and worry about clicking the right picture for my story; the headspace was unusual.
This break also made me realize who my real friends were, and I reconnected them through video and audio calls. Even when we were texting on Whatsapp, we were fully attentive.
If your relationship is strong, you won’t need any embellishment to talk or connect. You won’t need memes or celebrity gossip to entertain you. Instead, your anecdotes and your friends’ stories would be enough for you to spends hours talking about without interruption.
“Friends are those rare people who ask how we are, and then wait to hear the answer.” — Ed Cunningham