I joined Instagram three years ago.
I’ve had a Facebook account since 2008, but I’ve rarely been active on it. Facebook was slowly disappearing from my circle of friends, and staying in touch increasingly meant being on Instagram.
The irony is that, at the time, I was trying to reduce my digital footprint.
I am an AI engineer and statistician. Recommendation systems, machine learning, data analysis, and predictive models are part of my work. I was already familiar with the major data-privacy scandals, how user behaviour is collected at massive scale, and how algorithms continuously learn from our interactions to maximise engagement.
I had also been reading more and more about the neuroscience of attention, behavioural science, persuasive design and neuromarketing.
In other words, I understood the system surprisingly well.
I knew better.
I joined anyway.
At first, it seemed harmless. I mostly watched swimming videos, I love swimming, and convinced myself it was useful. Then came the endless stream of travel clips, politics, memes and random videos that the algorithm somehow knew I would watch.
Soon, I started playing the game myself. I posted pictures, shared stories and checked who had liked them. The feeling was small, but it was real.
Meanwhile, another voice kept reminding me:
“You know exactly how this works.”
Still, I stayed.
Then I started noticing stupid behaviours.
I would unlock my phone to check the weather and end up on Instagram. I would close the app, then reopen it five minutes later without thinking.
Sometimes I wasn’t even enjoying it.
The habit followed me everywhere: on the metro, in airports, on planes.
A few years earlier, I would have opened a book or a scientific paper. Those moments slowly disappeared.
What surprised me most was that reading in public even started to feel unusual. Almost everybody around me was looking at a screen. Without noticing it, I had adopted the same norm.
Scrolling had become normal.
Then there was the disappearance of time.
Twenty or thirty minutes would vanish, yet I could barely remember what I had watched.
This isn’t just a feeling, apparently. Infinite feeds remove what behavioural scientists call stopping cues. Unlike a book or a newspaper, there is no natural end. Experimental studies have also shown that short-video platforms distort our perception of time, and a recent meta-analysis covering nearly 100,000 participants found that heavy short-video use is consistently associated with poorer attention and inhibitory control.
Social media probably doesn’t “damage” the brain, not exactly. It just adapts to whatever we keep asking it to do.
The irony became almost comical.
By then I had read dozens of papers on attention, reward learning, recommender systems and persuasive technology. I understood, at least intellectually, why infinite feeds, variable rewards and personalised recommendations were so effective.
Yet every evening I still found myself scrolling.
That was probably the hardest part to admit.
Understanding the Matrix is apparently not enough to escape it.
Another contradiction slowly appeared.
I had always criticised people who experienced every trip through their phone. Beautiful landscapes had become selfie spots. Instead of enjoying the moment, people took dozens of almost identical pictures, hoping one would earn more likes.
Then I realised I was becoming one of them.
And while scrolling through all these images, I couldn’t help thinking about the invisible cost: billions of photos uploaded, duplicated, processed by AI models and stored indefinitely in data centres consuming enormous amounts of energy.
Nature had become content. Our attention had become the product, and, without our really noticing, our own behaviour had become the training data.
Every pause, every like, every second spent watching feeds the algorithm what keeps us engaged, and it gets a little better at shaping what we do next.
The loop feeds itself.
Eventually I stopped asking whether Instagram was good or bad.
Instead I asked a much simpler question:
What do I actually need from it?
The answer was surprisingly short.
I wanted to stay in touch with friends, and share the odd idea or bit of news. Neither of those needs an infinite algorithmic feed. I can message people directly, and write here instead.
Maybe I’ll fail. Maybe in six months I’ll install Instagram again.
I honestly don’t know.
But I don’t want to look back in thirty years and realise that I spent years helping algorithms learn who I am while they quietly reshaped what I paid attention to, what I valued and what felt normal.
I’d rather spend the next thirty minutes reading a book than lose them to a feed I won’t even remember tomorrow.
Selected references
- Maza et al. (2023). Association of Habitual Checking Behaviors on Social Media With Longitudinal Functional Brain Development. JAMA Pediatrics.
- Nguyen et al. (2025). Feeds, Feelings, and Focus: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin.
- Yang et al. (2023). Time distortion for short-form video users. Computers in Human Behavior.
- Meta Engineering (2025). Journey to 1000 Models: Scaling Instagram’s Recommendation System.