How Social Media Erases You
The Feed Forgets: Why Your Social Media Posts Don’t Matter (And That’s Okay)
Galactic Council Log 9001: Earth transmissions intercepted. Subject appears to be... obsessed with lip-syncing, food close-ups, and something called "hashtag grindset." It's no wonder the aliens are confused. If you vanished tomorrow, would your last post be a legacy... or a latte? Welcome to the digital void, where everything is content and nothing really matters.
Honestly, if this were a Black Mirror episode, we’d all be the cautionary tale—plugged in, performing for strangers, hoping for validation from a machine that’s already forgotten us.
The Digital Void We Feed
Let’s face it, the internet is hungry. It devours your creativity faster than you can hit "share." You pour your soul into a post, spend hours editing a video, or fine-tune a thought-provoking caption, and what do you get? Maybe a dozen likes. A few LOLs. Then, poof—gone in the endless scroll of Now. Social media is a machine of forgetfulness. It doesn’t care how hard you worked; it cares how loud, how trendy, and how now your content is.
Even the internet legends of yesteryear—Chewbacca Mom, Damn Daniel, cinnamon challenge guy—are now barely remembered echoes in the algorithmic ether. Their moment came, got memed, got monetized, and then got memory-holed.
The feed forgets. That isn’t your failure—it’s the platform's design. Your hot takes and hyper-edited selfies are just snacks for an algorithm that rewards attention over authenticity. Relevance isn’t earned, it’s extracted. And the moment you stop performing? You disappear.
That pressure isn’t just exhausting, it’s warping us. We don’t create for the joy of it anymore. We create because we’re afraid of being forgotten.
It’s like we’re all trapped in our own Westworld loop, resetting each day with a fresh batch of content in hopes this time we’ll break through to something lasting. Spoiler alert: the loop doesn’t care.
Virality and the Personal Brand Trap
Virality used to be an accident, like tripping into internet stardom and landing in a Buzzfeed listicle. Now, it's treated like a formula: post at the optimal time, use the right trending sound, don’t forget your quota of hashtags. But chasing virality is like trying to trap chaos in a Mason jar.
It doesn't reward merit; it rewards volatility. A parrot screams the right obscenity, and boom—a million views. Meanwhile, heartfelt stories and brilliant insights? Lost in the noise. And if lightning does strike, the algorithm demands an encore. Dance harder. Edit cleaner. Burn out faster.
Even worse, we’re not just chasing attention—we’re turning ourselves into brands to keep it. Every lunch is an aesthetic. Every hobby a content pillar. Even our breakdowns get tagged with #relatable. We're not people anymore; we're marketing departments in human skin.
And when you start branding your personality, you stop evolving and start performing. Who has time to be complicated or contradictory when your audience expects consistency? But you weren’t born to be a niche. You don’t need a mission statement for your identity.
This is exactly the kind of identity crisis you’d expect to see in something like Devs or Altered Carbon—stories where human consciousness is commodified and sliced into marketable bits. Except now it's our turn, and we’re doing it willingly.
Finding Freedom in Forgetting
Meanwhile, the content flood never stops. Everything starts to look the same, sound the same, feel the same. The algorithm keeps spinning up infinite recommendations until your feed becomes an ouroboros of sameness.
It's not your imagination. Burnout is a feature, not a bug. You're not broken for being tired of all this—you’re just human in a system that demands more than a human can give.
And yet, we still chase legacy. We want our digital footprint to mean something. But permanence online is mostly a myth. Platforms die. Archives break. Accounts vanish overnight. One policy shift, one Elon Musk mood swing, and everything you’ve built can be vaporized.
Real legacy isn’t measured in followers or views—it’s in the impact you leave on real people. People who remember you, not just your content.
Here’s a radical concept: post less. Not none. Just... less. Not every memory has to be published. Not every thought needs a hashtag. Give yourself permission to be invisible sometimes. Let a moment just exist, unrecorded, unfiltered, yours.
When you do choose to share, do it because it brings joy—not because the engagement gods demand sacrifice.
You don’t owe the feed your life. You don’t owe strangers your soul. Sometimes the healthiest thing you can do is log off and let the world go on without you for a while. Because being forgotten by the feed? That might just be the greatest freedom the internet can accidentally give you.
What’s the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever posted—and immediately regretted? Drop it in the comments below. Bonus points if it involved a hashtag you didn’t understand. Let’s bond over our collective cringe.
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And I hope all your times are Egotastic FunTimes! Love you. Bye bye!
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