For my on/off experiment, I decided to quit liking things on Instagram for as long as I could last. Like a typical millennial, I can’t imagine life without social media. My default applications when I check my phone in the morning and before I sleep are text, email, Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook. I’m a huge Instagram user, just because I enjoy the low commitment nature of it, it’s just looking at images and truthfully doesn’t require much thought or beyond a few seconds worth of attention on each image. I think it’s in my personality to just be one of “likes-everything” types, I like my close friends posts without even really looking closely, I have been called out on this by my best friend who referenced a photograph on her Instagram that I had liked but forgotten the content of. I also tend to like random images of food, crafts, funny quotes, or suggested posts in my feed. When I have a glass or two of wine, my frequency of likes increases exponentially!
I stopped liking things and felt extremely uncomfortable. I was thinking to myself, would my friends think I don’t like them anymore? Or would my acquaintances forget that I exist as a person? The first day, I got through without liking anything, but then the problem arose that I wanted to post a picture on my Instagram. I posted one and my friends and even other random users started to like it. I was beginning to feel guilt because of the like-for-like culture, that it’s supposed to be a collaborative, friendly social media platform and me not ‘liking’ someone’s posts back would be considered rude. By the end of the second day, I couldn’t take it anymore. The third morning when I woke up, I was back to my usual ways—liking away.
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