When Your Body Says No to Instagram—Even If You're a Photographer
Why do I keep resisting something everyone says I need to do?
Every time I ask someone whether Instagram is important, I get the same answer.
It is.
If you’re a photographer and you want your work to be seen, you need to be there.
And most likely, that’s true.
That’s why every few months I decide I’ll finally take Instagram seriously. I make a little plan in my head. I’ll post regularly. I’ll engage with people. I’ll answer comments. I’ll spend a bit of time there every day.
It usually lasts two or three weeks.
Then, without making any conscious decision, I slowly disappear again.
This has happened so many times now that I no longer think it’s accidental. Something in me simply doesn’t want to stay there.
Curiously, I don’t have the same problem with Substack. I genuinely enjoy spending time there. Reading. Writing. Commenting. Conversations seem to unfold naturally, and before I know it, an hour has passed.
Whenever I’m on Instagram, I have the feeling that everything moves too fast for anything real to happen. Instead of conversations, there are reactions. Instead of replies, there are emojis. Hearts. Flames. Clapping hands. Rainbows. Rockets.
Maybe that’s simply the nature of the platform. Maybe it was never designed for deep attention.
Then there is something else.
I constantly sense a kind of pretense.
It feels as if everyone is trying to become the version of themselves they wish they already were. The perfect photographer. The perfect traveller. The perfect artist. The perfect life.
At one point I even came up with a little saying that keeps coming back to me.
“What you show is often what you don’t have.”
I’m not pretending to be above any of this.
Likes feel good.
Followers feel good.
Restacks feel good.
If someone appreciates my work, I enjoy it just as much as anybody else.
We all like dopamine hits.
The difference is that on Instagram I constantly have the feeling that the dopamine hit has become the purpose.
Popularity.
Social proof.
And beautiful photographs that feed both.
Beautiful skies.
Beautiful colours.
Beautiful smiles.
Beautiful editing.
Compositions I could never have imagined.
Sometimes I don’t even know whether I’m looking at a photograph, a digital illustration, AI, or five hours of post-processing.
And the strange thing is...
many of them don’t make me feel anything.
Is that simply an excuse for my lack of technical knowledge?
Maybe.
But my body never lies.
The older I get, the more I notice that my body reacts before my mind does.
Whenever I spend time on Instagram, something tightens inside me. I become anxious.
Whenever I sit down to write here, I become curious. I actually have to stop myself from staying here too long.
Both platforms remind me of places I've been in real life.
Instagram feels like walking into a luxury club where everyone is perfectly dressed, perfectly groomed and perfectly posed. Designer brands everywhere. Bright lights. Beautiful people. Everyone trying very hard to look as though they’re effortlessly having the best night of their lives.
Then, after enough alcohol, the carefully constructed image finally begins to crack, and actual people slowly start appearing underneath.
Substack feels completely different.
It feels like walking into a rock club.
There’s a band playing somewhere in the background. You meet someone at the bar. You order a beer. You spend half an hour talking about something that actually matters to you. Someone gives you a genuine pat on the back. Nobody seems to be trying to impress anyone.
By the time you leave, you feel lighter.
Connected.
Understood.
Encouraged.
It feels human.
Maybe that's why I don't mind investing my time here.
I happily spend at least an hour a day writing here, reading, commenting and replying.
Every social platform requires time.
Another hour for Instagram?
I don’t know.
Where exactly am I supposed to find it?
If it were photography...
or playing the guitar...
or reading...
I’d probably rearrange my day without thinking.
But Instagram?
I don’t know.
Someone will completely disagree with me.
Someone might even convince me that Instagram deserves another chance.
Or maybe this was never really about Instagram.
Maybe I simply wanted to understand why something that is supposedly important creates so much resistance in me.
And yet...
if Instagram really is an essential part of being a photographer, perhaps I should simply accept it and do it anyway.
I genuinely don’t know.
Making hundreds of photographs every week brings me joy.
Spending another hour promoting them doesn’t.
Maybe that’s simply part of the job.
Or maybe I’m trying to become the wrong kind of photographer.
I know one thing, though.
Pharmacist I am definitely not.
Why spend so much time and effort creating an image just so it can be swipe by someone with no attention span in less time than it takes to delete an email. There is a better class of viewers here. We create because we need to create. If people like and comment, that's great but for a long time great artists made great ard because they were driven to whether people saw it or not. No one is hitting the "like" button on art work in MOMA.
You have hit the nerve here, Davor. I am not a photographer, nor a person whose work depends on social media, but what you described is pretty much it. For Instagram, for social gatherings, for things with shiny wrappers and overly-curated facades in mass culture.
It is also true that the body will react first. The body doesn't lie, just as we are repelled by certain scents, tastes, and people, we are repelled by manifestations of certain types of behaviors and visuals of those behaviors.
Instagram has become an accumulation of all of them at this point (barring the taste and smell). It became the flat average of all those things we used to find aesthetically pleasing, copied and replicated and augmented to the point of distortion. And with every averaging and every augmentation it has been stripped of yet another layer of what made those things beautiful to begin with.