Snap, edit, publish, rinse, repeat. The feelings you get from sending your content into the digiverse void is a mixed bag – a quick dopamine rush followed by an inevitable crash, typically varying in intensity based on how much engagement you’ll get in the first hour. A girlfriend once told me, “I have to physically put my phone down as soon as I hit post – otherwise I just cannot do it, I feel gross.” We both laugh at the absurdity of what the process of posting has come to. Even if we admit we probably shouldn’t worry about something so trivial and banal, we’re comforted by the fact we collectively – albeit secretly – still do.

Avoiding social media in 2024 is no different than avoiding corporate drinks. You’re free to choose whether or not to participate, but in case you do abstain, you’re willingly saying goodbye to unspoken prospects: new opportunities, inside jokes, and climbing up the career ladder. Why would you willingly deprive yourself of something everyone in your circle is actively partaking in? Nobody likes to miss out on things. So we continue on posting: sometimes with joy, and other times with disgust. But wait, why are we disgusted in the first place? Here’s my take.

The Loop

People post on social media for different reasons. For some, it’s strictly a self-expression tool. For others, it’s an important personal brand building avenue. Whatever one’s case may be, we’re all chained to the same framework: sharing what we do, buy, think, and look like in hopes of being discovered in the right place, at the right time, and by the right people. Our exposure (or lack thereof) is dictated by the algorithm, and solely depends on two factors: luck and consistency. Or so they say – this is not something we can verify while being at the mercy of mysterious Big Tech.

If social media’s primary goal is to keep you engaged on the app for as long as possible, the infamous algorithm makes sense — it rewards you incrementally in parallel to your posting schedule. The more you post, the more eyes will see it. If you decide to stop and take a well-deserved break, you run the risk of watching your hard-earned views and comments plummet. There is no finish line and no end game – you simply put out content to hopefully increase your engagement to then get more people to watch your forthcoming content. So, the grand prize we get for posting is just.. more posting. The algorithm is not a sprint or a marathon – it’s a treadmill. It’s only natural to feel grossed out when the process is wired against you in such a futile, almost embarrassing way.

The Expiration Date

Let’s say you’re okay with the pressure of having to put out new content constantly and consistently – fair enough. Things get even trickier: as we try to assess and establish our online persona, the never-ending trends and cores seem to rapidly come out of the woodwork; and they’re more than happy to keep us on our toes. Watching the trend cycle shortening to a ridiculous degree (be that with fashion, beauty, wellness, viral songs, or a specific style of content), you have no choice but to pursue it diligently. Not only do you have to be timely with the things you post, your ideas now have an expiration date. Every new trend is merely an invitation to grab someone’s attention before it’s too late.

As much as we’d like to believe otherwise, all of this is not about creativity and self-expression – it’s about staying relevant so that you aren’t forgotten. The price you pay for staying in a discoverable enough spot on the content conveyor belt is, perhaps, feeling like there’s a ticking bomb living in your head.

The Girl-Next-Doorness

The cherry on top is our earnest desire to be perceived as casual and effortless, as if posting on social media is at the bottom of our priority list. We all want our feed to feel as something we do on the side without ever giving it much consideration: Hey, so I’m just putting this out and totally didn’t take an hour to plan the precise order, music, caption, and timing. There was once an attempt (and I’d like to believe it was sincere) to make social media a more casual, contrarian movement amidst the ultra-polished, heavily edited photos and videos. What started out as a pure intention has since been commodified, too. Remember BeReal? Photo dumps? Laidback digital presence has morphed into newly added pressure to seem casual at all costs, which is a paradox in and of itself. No one wants to see perfection, but your life better be as close to perfection as possible – otherwise no one is interested.

You don’t have to go far to find proof: even top-earning influencers have embraced and perpetuated the art of faux unpretentiousness. We’re stuck in a loop because social media, by nature, goes against any casual and mundane joys of life – it was always only a matter of time before our quest to ease the seriousness of it all would become an insidious “I’m Just Like You (But Better)” trope. Consequently, we are now feeling the pressure of something that was originally created to alleviate said pressure. Social media doesn’t want you to relax and enjoy your life – if it did, you wouldn’t be scrolling. It wants you to work hard and do whatever it takes to get there, all while remaining casual about it.

Posting on social media feels disgusting because we’re stressed out by the mere concept – and it’s not our fault. Whether we admit it or not, we’re competing: with ourselves and our own metrics, for people’s limited attention span, with our exes and the curious eyes of outsiders, and most importantly, for the algorithm to reward us with the relevancy we desire. If we’re frank for a second, can we honestly say we don’t take social media seriously enough to stress about it? Because the majority of us absolutely do. No matter our follower count or how curated-uncurated our feed comes across, the cornerstone of posting is generation of attention.

It’s natural to care about attention, and it’s natural to feel grossed out when getting said attention requires you to abide by strict unspoken rules. At the end of the day, we must find a realistic solution to make it all feel a bit less infuriating. ‘Logging off’ doesn’t work – social media is so closely intertwined with everything we do, we have no choice but to accept the role it plays in our personal and professional lives. What we can do is try to find ways to work with it, not against it. We can start small: for instance, by confessing to our friends in secrecy how gross it can sometimes feel.