instagram is a crazed bazaar
Every time you open the Instagram app, perhaps something in your body closes / shuts down / freezes.
Your shoulders tighten. Your breath gets shallow. Maybe there's a flutter of anxiety in your chest, or a dull heaviness that settles over you before you even start scrolling. You tell yourself it's just resistance, that you need to build more capacity for visibility, that successful entrepreneurs show up consistently no matter what.
But what if your body is telling you the truth?
What if your nervous system isn't malfunctioning? What if it's responding accurately to a room that is designed to consume you?
What Instagram Has Become
Let's be explicit about what's actually happening on these platforms, because to not see this—to gaslight our own somatic responses—is a spiritual bypass in itself.
Instagram is no longer the community-building tool it once was. It has become a crazed bazaar where your consent has been systematically violated on multiple levels.
The algorithm force-feeds you content you never asked for. You follow 200 accounts of practitioners, artists, and friends and yet, the platform shows you content from 2,000 accounts you've never heard of, prioritizing what keeps you scrolling and not what nourishes you, not what you chose to see. Your feed is no longer yours. You've lost agency over what you consume.
Your data is being harvested and monetized without your meaningful consent. And it’s here that we can see that surveillance capitalism isn't a conspiracy theory, it's the business model of most of the online world. Your attention patterns, your vulnerabilities, your deepest longings are being tracked, packaged, and sold. Sometimes, it feels like the platform knows more about you than you know about yourself and that “information” is being used to manipulate your behavior.
The psychological manipulation is by design. Endless scroll. Dopamine hits calibrated to keep you coming back. Notification timing optimized for addiction. The intermittent reinforcement schedule of likes and comments that keeps you checking, hoping, performing. These aren't bugs, they're key features.
Many of us are hiding Instagram addictions. I've hidden mine. We don't talk about how we reach for the app when we're anxious, bored, or avoiding something difficult. We don't name how much of our creative life force gets poured into a platform that gives us crumbs in return.
It's Energetically Cannibalistic
Here's what we're not saying enough: You're in a room that is trying to devour you.
And learning how to be seen isn't about expanding your capacity for visibility anymore. After a certain point, you start to realize that you're not just building a business, you're feeding an algorithm that decides whether you're worthy of being seen. And when you don't perform well enough, when your posts don't land, when the engagement drops, you're left feeling like you failed at the very act of existing online.
The platform wants your content, your face, your story, your vulnerability, your raw unfiltered self—all of it fed into a machine that never says "enough." It's consumption. It's energetically cannibalistic. And many of us keep saying yes to that process, even though it doesn't feel right.
Where Is Your Discernment?
This is where discernment comes in.
Your nervous system has been telling you something is wrong. Your body has been giving you signals—the tightness, the shutdown, the dread. These aren't signs that you need to do more shadow work and inner child work around visibility. These are signs that you're in an environment that doesn't honor your life force.
To ignore this, to push through it, to gaslight yourself into believing you just need to "show up more consistently", that's the bypass.
The question isn't how to make yourself comfortable in a cannibalistic room. The question is: What are you building instead?
