Once you start, it's even harder to get out than

[shukla7789]

A clip from a Taylor Swift concert, typically the kind of content that plays on repeat on my app… | Instagram screenshot

finding the exit at the Louvre. You think you're just passing the time by making a coffee, and five hours later you find yourself crying in front of a pasta bake video, exhausted and disoriented.



Or a white bean gratin that we are “obsessed with” , indeed. | Instagram screenshot

Social Media Junk Food
Reels were introduced by vietnam mobile database in the summer of 2020 to compete with TikTok, a cool social network popular with young people—which is why you won't find me there. Except that Instagram Reels is the sub-TikTok. It's the Pradu bag or Chonel perfume of online presence. The design is ugly, the video quality is often lousy, and the content is forgotten as quickly as it's ingested.

Instagram Reels is the junk food of social media, which is already the junk food of the internet. It's the digital waste that internet rats gorge on when no one else wants it. Yes, in this metaphor, I am a rat.



So I'm a rat who watches dog and cat videos. | Instagram screenshot

Like every element of your life now, the selection was composed by an algorithm based on your interests. As for me, my reels are made up of 60% pasta recipe videos, 30% celebrity couples (Tom Holland and Zendaya, Emily Blunt and John Krasinski), and 10% videos of hedgehog massages, singing goats, or some other adorable nonsense.

Greatest hits also include videos of Saoirse Ronan pronouncing her name correctly, videos asking me if I knew Lily-Rose Depp had famous parents (yes), and no matter what I do—WHAT I DO—videos of Penn Badgley's domestic life. This man won't leave me alone and it has to stop.

Like a predator, Instagram Reels can be particularly dangerous when you're vulnerable. About once a month, usually when I'm suffering from a turbo hangover that prevents me from moving or stringing together more than five words per hour, I waste an entire day, for example, giving myself thumb cramps watching these mind-numbing videos. This is the not the multiverse , this is the stupidity.

Cherry and tomato chicken nuggets (or vice versa)
In these moments of intense weakness, too exhausted to look away, I slowly descend into madness, one thirty-second video after another. What's the point of that clip of Paul Mescal saying he likes chicken nuggets?