Culture Slut: The Passing of Time and Being Too Much For Instagram
Make it stand out
It's coming up to the end of the year, and girls, it’s been a lot. At the risk of sounding old, the months have truly flown by and I can’t believe 2023 is over. In some respects, I’m pleased to have made it through relatively unscathed, particularly after the long desperate summer depression that came after the loss of a friend, but I’m also scared at the idea of life slipping through my fingers.
Another year gone with no great romance, another year working a dull night shift job to pay the bills, another year growing apart from friends, closer to others, losing touch with crowds that made things exciting, but also finding so much more. Until it stops. Your capacity is full and you have no space to forge new connections.
I experienced this in quite a literal way this winter and it sent me spiralling for quite a few weeks. I don’t keep a diary or an address book, I’m not great at keeping on top of emails or making contact lists, I organise pretty much all of my socialising, nightlife projects, and working relationships through Instagram. It sounds shallow, but Instagram is truly a key element of regulating my emotions and mental health - from finding solace in looking at the long thread of my own posts to distraction in the endless stream of content in my main feed. In previous years, when depression hits, I’ve been able to scroll through my phone and look at pictures of me at parties, hanging out with friends, making art, having a great time, persevering, showing resilience, surviving, and it has given me the inspiration to carry on. This summer, after the death of our friend, I made an internal rule to post at least once every 24 hours so that I could see the manifestation of time passing since we heard the news, so that I could know that days still existed, that the earth still moved. It allowed me to take comfort in the fact that, if nothing else, at least the calendar was moving forwards.
___STEADY_PAYWALL___
As I lay rotting in my bed, or on the sofa, or on endless train journeys, I could turn my mind away from the emptiness I felt inside by focusing on what everyone else was posting. Art made by hot boys in New York, fashion commentary by quippy millennial TikTok critics, sexy videos objectifying straight male athletes for the queer gaze, a hundred million meme accounts of varying levels of geographic specificity, gays with soothing voices painting dolls or drawing fashion plates, videos of good looking boys and girls just getting dressed and talking about the merits of a boring pair of jeans, Aussie cake decorators, colour matching paint mixologists, highlights from podcasts I will never hear, archival Hollywood prints, make up inspirations, the options are truly endless and I love them all. I also followed them all. Any account that provided me even the slightest hint of joy, whether erotic, aesthetic, intellectual or just distracting earned my online loyalty, until it all stopped.
I thought my Instagram had become infected. I couldn’t follow any more accounts, or interact with content the way I had been, no matter how hard I tried. I updated the app every few days. I deleted and reinstalled it, losing a whole swathe of draft posts I kept in the chamber for rainy days. I looked into downloading software to clean up any glitches there might be. Eventually, after researching, I found out that the unspeakable had happened. I had followed the maximum number of accounts that Instagram allows - around 7500.
Who knows why Insta even has a following limit, you’d think they’d be all for excessive content consumption, but no. I was at the limit. Oh well, I thought, it doesn’t really matter. But then I started to stagnate. I couldn’t follow threads down rabbit holes any more, I couldn’t find niche fashion accounts that spoke to my tastes, or follow boys that showed vulnerability and naked flesh online, or exciting new restaurants and art groups. It weighed on my mind. It started to spill out into my real life too. The club night I am one of the organisers for was doing a joint event with a film collective and I wasn’t able to liaise with them via Instagram, I couldn’t follow them back. New friends I made at parties would ask me why I didn’t have them on Insta and I’d have to explain about the glitches. Handsome guys I snogged on dance floors would offer to put their profiles on my phone, but they would become lost the second I closed the app. It was too much. My dedication to receiving the full amount of content meant I could no longer move forwards, I was in a state of atrophy.
I had no choice but to start the mammoth task of going through my following list and start manually removing people. I set the list to show me the accounts I had been following the longest first, figuring some of them were probably not active anymore, or had no impact on my current life, and went from there. At first it was easy, accounts that hadn’t posted since 2017, people with names I didn’t remember and faces I didn’t recognise, profiles that had at some point been hacked and turned into give away scam competitions, profiles that probably had once been a personal account but now was painting pots cafe or an energy crystal shop or any other small business I had no interest in. Then came people I did recognise, people who I went to secondary school or sixth form college with who were in their 30s now, smiling at me from wedding pictures and baby christenings and children's birthday parties. They looked so old. Receding hairlines and bad suits, hen party posts with pink Prosecco and Boohoo dresses, “did a thing this Christmas with this one”, Maisie’s first day of school. Where has the time gone? Do I look that old? I’m still dressing up in cheap wigs and going to nightclubs; I’m still running from real responsibilities. I unfollowed all of them. I don’t need that reminder of my own ageing body, and I hated everyone in school anyway.
The quest carried on. Now I’m seeing people I went to art school with, people who shared houses with my friends, people who sat in lectures with me and emailed notes to me when I skipped class, people who I got drunk with in the student library rather than doing the research for our group project. I’m seeing people who’s toilets I’ve thrown up in, who’s couches I’ve slept on, who’s parties I helped clean up. I’m seeing people whose hair I cut, with clippers with no safety blade whilst they sat on a chair in a grotty kitchen, people who I persuaded into bunking off an afternoon lecture so we could go for a boozy lunch at the student union, a pint and a panini that would roll right through the afternoon into the evening and the worst club night in the world: Messy Mondayz. People that I spent a hellish few days with building walls and putting up our degree shown in the Old Truman Brewery in east London, sweating over paint and plasterboard, trying not to fight over the two or three overworked technicians who were sent to help us. I don’t want to unfollow them all. A lot of these memories are good. I don’t want to lose anything. Or anyone. Ever again.
“I think that a lot of us are scared of change, of moving forward so quickly that we lose what we leave behind, and that the invention of online social media has become a way to document the very memories that made us who we are.”
Now it’s girls from the early part of my post-art-school career. Stylists we worked with once who don’t even work in fashion any more. Photo collectives I joined that are no longer active because of internal fighting. Hairstylists that have become wellness influencers after having kids. Magazines I didn’t like then and like even less now. Creative directors I met once but thought I should try to keep in touch with, even though they never followed me back. These people are easy to unfollow. I am becoming ruthless. I question why I ever followed anyone in the first place. Reality TV stars that have faded into obscurity. Models that were huge in 2015 but barely even work now. Drag Race contestants. Alyssa Edwards. Why the fuck am I following Alyssa Edwards? I never even liked her. Gone.
And of course, there are boys. Thousands of boys. Boys that I’ve seen online and liked the look of, boys that I’ve spoken to on Grindr and clicked through to their Instagram, boys I met in clubs and exchanged details (and saliva) with. There are famous club kids from the 2010s who barely go out any more, iconic LA gogo boys that have settled down with boyfriends and go on hiking holidays, boys who were in their late 40s when I first met them who are now well into their 60s and looking it. I make a rule, if their most recent three rows of pictures are only of food, holiday pictures, or hiking, they are out. I don’t need normies, I don’t need missed connections, I don’t need what-ifs. What I do find is heartbreaking. Boys that I’d forgotten about who are no longer here. A night club personality I admired who got hit by a car. An adult film star who had complications from Covid. A gogo boy in LA who looked like me, and who I used to talk with about meeting in London one day, who lost a battle with cancer, his final row of pictures being him wearing a tiara and feather boa in a hospital room, being visited by his friends and family.
It’s too much. After this, I outsourced the emotional labour to a friend, gave her my password and told her just to unfollow anyone who looked too normie, no questions asked.
I think that a lot of us are scared of change, of moving forward so quickly that we lose what we leave behind, and that the invention of online social media has become a way to document the very memories that made us who we are. A social media account is an archive of connections that meant something to us, if only in that specific moment. When Myspace closed, emails were sent out to all associated email addresses giving warning so that all users, whether active or not, could download the content they still had online. The same thing happened with Vine. A feature was added so that users could download all their videos, which are now presumably kicking around on dusty hard drives in overstuffed cupboards. Memory can be burdensome, it can be overwhelming, it can be magical, but it needs maintenance. Don’t let nostalgia prevent you from moving forwards. What-ifs serve no purpose. We need to decide what to keep and what to let go, otherwise you can find yourself drowning in a thousand yesterdays, with no tomorrow even on the horizon. Love. Survive. Progress. Happy New Year.
Words: Misha Mn