mast

April 10, 2025

social media is designed to be addicting but ultimately i feel like it's a personal drive to be seen and acknowledged and remembered that keeps us on the apps. the accounts where i don't see people i personally know aren't remotely as addicting as the ones where i collect acquaintances like pokémon cards. i made a plan to reinstall my account for two weeks, but i'm tying myself to a mast because i don't want to revert to old habits.

The Mast I'm Tied To

1. have no expectations.
2. blur out/black out everyone else's posts -- don't get inundated by others' silly content. do not scroll.
3. do not write anything. simply repost without a caption of my own.
4. i must re-delete my account within two weeks of reinstallation.
5. i must keep my phone on grayscale the entire time.
6. if i break any of the above rules, re-delete the account immediately.

i genuinely have no idea if this will work but i want it to work. i am not an Instagram user and i'm simply doing it to extract the temporary dopamine from social media and immediately returning to the more genuine world of handcrafted sites.

i'm only doing this because i recently got featured on my school's website/news/social media and is it because i want some attention? is that bad? i feel like it's bad in the sense that these past two months i've been so blissfully at peace without social media and now the urge to present myself online in a non-anonymous manner has returned. but i want the peace. i wasn't even the one who posted and i'm already comparing my post to other posts. i'm already comparing myself to others via a mechanism i do not determine, via an algorithm that is fundamentally fickle and unjust and biased.