At some point during the latter stages of lockdown, the tastes, desires, and behaviors of people on social media took an emphatic turn. Though few are naïve enough to have ever taken Instagram content at face value, it became increasingly difficult to believe that someone could be leading a magnificent life as a pandemic raged. And so, people started utilizing Instagram’s carousel feature, uploading deliberately sloppy photo dumps to the grid in an attempt to counter-signal and “get real” with their followers. For the most part, culture commentators positioned this shift as a powerful riposte to the intensely manicured posts that had become the app’s stock-in-trade during the 2010s, an effort to liberate us from the tyranny of perfection.
And yet, now it would seem that the advised—and coolest—etiquette to uphold is to avoid posting anything on Instagram at all. In other words, just being on Instagram as opposed to participating on Instagram—because how elusive and intriguing it is to stumble upon a blank account with a default profile picture?
Of course, I understand the desire to abscond: Instagram is an obstacle on the path to self-actualization, its slot machine of an algorithm designed to keep people scrolling without ever feeling wholly satisfied. To scroll the app in 2024 is to wade through a series of sponsored posts from brands, recommended Reels ripped from TikTok, and the occasional photo of a friend—more often than not posted several days ago. But here’s the thing: you cannot craft mystique. To make the conscious decision to not post—because it is “cool”—is just as much an act of self-mythologizing as a Facetuned selfie or a “candid” photo dump.
The problem here is that people seem to be conflating absence with mystery—perhaps using the cast of Euphoria as an example of how to best engage with Instagram. Alexa Demie, for example, has not posted since August 2023 and as a result she is deemed the coolest of the show’s stars. That is, of course, accurate, but Demie’s It-girl status has less to do with the frequency of her Instagram posts than it does the thousands of lives she led before playing Maddy Perez.
It is a strange thing when non-famous people begin to apply concepts like “overexposure” to their own lives, because the painful truth is: you are either born an enigma (like Demie) or you are not (like that blood-injecting billionaire who continues to document his various attempts to de-age on X). There will never again be a time without social media, but once anything becomes conventional—be that posting a carousel or opting to post nothing at all—it no longer creates the stimulus necessary for someone to pay attention.
Instead, think of posting on Instagram like getting dressed in the morning: the moment you try too hard—laying bare the chasm between who you really are and who you would like the world to perceive you to be—you have lost the game. So post! Or don’t post. Because there are few things more tragic than putting effort into being effortless.