Metadata
- Author: Kyle Chayka
- Full Title:: Are You Experiencing Posting Ennui?
- Category:: 🗞️Articles
- URL:: https://archive.ph/pSuuM
- Read date:: 2025-08-12
Highlights
suddenly, you could share the most mundane moments of your life with a crowd of waiting strangers who might just be excited to see them. (View Highlight)
Lately, though, I’ve found myself missing the breakfast photo and its equivalents online. There don’t seem to be as many people casually sharing random moments from their lives. (View Highlight)
The quotidian doesn’t have as much of a place in this landscape. Thus, many people simply aren’t posting as much as they used to. (View Highlight)
“Sometimes with everything going on in the world I get worried I look insensitive posting stuff like that,” she later explained. “I get self-conscious.” (View Highlight)
millennials who grew up on social media are moving into middle age and perhaps seeking more privacy in their lives; once you’ve settled down with a partner and children, perhaps there’s less obvious incentive to project your personality online. (View Highlight)
Kanika Mehra, a twenty-four-year-old, told me, “I feel like everyone in my generation is kind of a voyeur now,” still scrolling but not posting. She continued, “People don’t want to be perceived,” and if they do post they “feel a bit of a vulnerability hangover.” (View Highlight)
The design of social media has discouraged casual posting, with metrics that make users feel inadequate for not getting enough attention, and with algorithmic feeds that prioritize popular accounts that post constantly—not mundane moments but punditry, provocation, and self-promotion. (View Highlight)
If there’s no guarantee that our friends will even see what we post, then what is the incentive to keep doing it? (View Highlight)
We might also be heading toward something like Posting Zero, a point at which normal people—the unprofessionalized, uncommodified, unrefined masses—stop sharing things on social media as they tire of the noise, the friction, and the exposure. (View Highlight)
the presence of normies was what made social media worth tuning into. (View Highlight)