It hasn’t even been five days since Instants launched, and already I feel like this situationship is inevitably heading toward its end.
One thing platforms refuse to accept is that we’re exhausted. Not just from life, but from them too.
At this point, every new platform feature is no longer met with the excitement we used to have back when we were fresh-faced little digital flowers eagerly tapping every blinking notification. Now, every update feels like a small digital Golgotha we have to climb just to avoid falling technologically behind and having Claude come steal our jobs.
Instagram launches something, and all millennials now react exactly like our parents did whenever Viber updated and moved the send button somewhere else.
“What are Instants?”, “Why is it taking photos by itself?”, “Did this just upload?”, “What even is this?”
Deep breaths. The time has come, unfortunately, for us to become the boomers of technology. We used to make fun of our parents for typing with one finger, and now we’re the ones having panic attacks because Instagram randomly decided to become BeReal overnight.
Obviously, apps all want the same thing now: to become more personal, more unfiltered, more “send something quickly to your close friends without overthinking it because honestly, enough already.” The funniest part is that every app copies every other app so aggressively now that eventually you won’t even know which one you’re on anymore.
Instagram wants to become TikTok, TikTok wants to become YouTube, and whatever X wants to become, I truly could not care less about. Somewhere in the middle of all this are the rest of us, pressing buttons like elderly people trying to use an ATM.
“What are Instants?”, “Why is it taking photos by itself?”, “Did this just upload?”, “What even is this?”
Because it’s literally my job to try every new thing that comes out, I used Instants over the weekend, and I have to say: it felt completely unnecessary. My friends’ photos are unbelievably bad, even for spontaneous snapshots. Sure, authenticity matters, but we don’t also need to become aesthetically offensive.
On top of that, you barely even have time to see who posted what. You tap through photos so quickly that after a while it starts feeling like Tinder, and your brain automatically slips into muscle-memory rejection mode: bad framing, terrible lighting, way too much thirst trap energy, too desperate, absolutely not a duckface, come on now.
Most closed groups become active when we’re bored, craving attention, or feeling lonely, deeply lonely, so yes, Instants are perfect for spontaneous selfies you regret literally two minutes after posting, except then you have to coexist with them for another 23 hours and 58 minutes until the story disappears. Like a henna moon tattoo you got drunk on Ios in 2008 and had to pretend you liked until the sun finally came up.
Social media fatigue, meaning the collective exhaustion of being permanently online, just so you don’t say I sound like Kalomoira, is universal now. We don’t want more meaningless content. We can’t even process the content that already exists.
If an app genuinely wants to impress us at this point, it shouldn’t release another feature.
It should kindly shut the hell up and leave us alone.
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