Nobody Posts Their Real Life Anymore. They Post Their Group Chat.

The Instagram feed is the display windows. The group chat is where life actually happens.

Look at the Instagram feed of a typical young person today. You will see a picture perfect lifestyle of an Instagram influencer with aesthetic cafes, luxury dinners, weekend getaways, golden hour selfies, and captions.

But that’s not where the actual life happens. Life happens in the group chats, Instagram Close Friends, disappearing messages, and stories that never make it to the feed. Social media used to be all about visibility. The more followers, likes, and comments you had, the more social influence you had.

But nowadays youth is approaching social media differently.

Nowadays, public profiles feel like personal brands rather than personal diaries. It’s where people showcase their best moments, achievements, fashionable outfits, and carefully crafted identities.

The audience is not your friends only. It is your colleagues, recruiters, acquaintances, former classmates, and people whom you barely know.

Therefore, people became more selective about what they share.

The raw version of life has been moved somewhere else.

Doomscrolling at 1 AM: What Are We Really Looking For?

A love letter (and a call-out) to everyone, with a meeting at 9 AM and a screen time report at 1 AM. As you read a thread about the state of the economy and watch a stranger rate airport lounges, and watching a 40-second video of someone’s cat judging a houseplant.

So let’s ask the real question: what are we really looking for? Let’s be honest.

You’re not scrolling because the feed is so good. You’re scrolling because you have some free time today and no one needs anything from you. After a day of hard work, strategy meetings, and being on, your brain just wants to turn off. You look at the ceiling, but it feels like a list of things you need to do, so you pick up your phone. There is less “I want to” and more “I don’t want to think about anything real.” So we label Doomscrolling as staying “informed,” networking,” and “trend spotting.

Here is the unfiltered truth: You are reading everyone else’s press release and measuring it against your personal rough draft. This is an unfair comparison, and would never pass the litmus test in your case study. With the constant news, opinions, and market fears on the feed, we train ourselves to expect the next worst thing to happen. Instead we become more anxious and less prepared, with literally no actionable things to do. You can care about the world and still be able to go to bed at night.

These two things are not mutually It is 1 AM, and most of us do not need information or entertainment at this time. Most of us are in search of permission to sleep, but no feed can provide that; only we can. Tonight, try doing something different: allow the day to come to an end. Quit using the app, (or at least the pillow), and make your mind blank. Tomorrow you has many plans, and that tomorrow you will not get anything done if he/she is exhausted.

We stopped posting our reality. The peak moments of our life exists on the feed, while the real life, with the raw pictures, the jokes between us and the “I’m not really okay today,” all exists in the group chat.
This way, instead of answering the midnight call at 1 am from your scrolling, you can send a message in the group chat. Share that meme or that message saying how tired you are. It’s about connecting, not about any content.

– Aira 🌿