The diary of almost everything

I have a reasonably healthy relationship with my phone, by which I mean there are entire periods of the day when I can put it down without experiencing any obvious withdrawal symptoms. I can disappear into a good book, watch a series without simultaneously scrolling through something else and spend an afternoon pottering around the house without needing to know what strangers on the internet are doing.
And then I open Instagram.

I should probably mention that Instagram is where I’ve settled at this stage of my life. TikTok feels like a party I might technically still be allowed into but where I would spend most of the evening wondering why everyone is filming themselves.

Instagram feels safer.
Until the algorithm gets hold of me.

A while ago, I saw someone doing a kinda chic post. The idea was simple: kinda chic that I built this entire business by myself, followed by several other things about her life that she had decided were, indeed, kinda chic.

I liked it. It was funny, slightly self-congratulatory in an acceptable way and different enough to make me stop scrolling.

Then I saw another one…..and another one.

And approximately fourteen hundred kinda chic posts later, I was ready to personally retire the phrase from the English language.
This happens to me all the time. Someone comes up with a format like things I absolutely need in my thirties or things I wish I’d known before forty, and the first time I see it I think, oh, that’s quite good. By the fifteenth version I’ve somehow become irritated with people I’ve never met for participating in something I willingly watched.

The algorithm, of course, notices none of this distinction. It only knows that I stopped scrolling for three seconds, which it interprets as a lifelong commitment.
So now everybody is telling me what I need to know before forty.

Unfortunately, they don’t agree.
One woman thinks I need retinol, another thinks I need to stop caring what people think, someone else wants me to lift weights, drink electrolytes, buy better underwear, leave toxic friendships, eat more protein and book the trip.
At this rate, turning forty is going to require project management software.

The strange thing is that none of these people are necessarily doing anything wrong. Trends are trends precisely because people copy them, and if your income depends on social media, I imagine ignoring whatever everyone is currently watching is probably not a particularly clever business strategy. There must be enormous pressure to notice the next thing early enough to join in before people like me have seen it seventeen times and become inexplicably hostile towards it.

I follow quite a few fashion accounts because I genuinely enjoy seeing how people style clothes. Recently I came across an outfit I really liked, but after a few seconds I realised that the woman wearing it wasn’t just presenting clothes in a similar way to someone else I follow. She moved like her. The same turn, the same little step towards the camera, the same way of adjusting the jacket and then walking away.
It was like watching someone cover a song without changing the arrangement.
And suddenly I wasn’t looking at the outfit anymore. I was wondering how many people on Instagram are currently learning the same walk.

Food seems to have reached a similar problem. I follow lots of recipe accounts, particularly because Instagram has correctly identified that I will stop scrolling for almost anything involving melted cheese or an unnecessarily high amount of protein. But there are only so many ways humanity can combine chicken, yoghurt, garlic and spices before somebody is going to accuse somebody else of stealing dinner.

Every now and then a recipe creator announces that another creator copied their recipe, and I find myself wondering where exactly ownership begins. If you’ve changed the paprika to smoked paprika and added half an egg, have you invented something? Is lasagne still lasagne if you put cottage cheese in it and call it high protein?

I don’t know. I just wanted dinner.

Then there is an entire genre of people whose content consists of watching somebody else’s recipe, making it themselves and telling us whether it’s any good. The original video plays first, then they recreate it step by step, eat it and give it a score.

And every time I watch one, two thoughts occur to me almost simultaneously.
Isn’t this basically borrowing somebody else’s content?
Followed immediately by:
Why didn’t I think of this?
Which is inconvenient, because it prevents me from occupying the moral high ground for very long.

The worst part is that I’m not even consistent about which trends annoy me. There was one where people pretended they were at the beginning of their own Netflix documentary, complete with the Netflix sound, and sat down to explain what their documentary would be about.
I loved those.

There is absolutely no intellectual defence for this. It was also a repeated format. Everybody was doing essentially the same thing. The only difference was that for some reason this particular trend entertained me rather than making me want to confiscate everyone’s phone.

Maybe that’s all there is to it. Perhaps originality isn’t really what I’m looking for. Maybe I just want to be surprised often enough that I don’t notice the machinery underneath.

Because Instagram is a strange place to demand authenticity. We are all standing in roughly the same digital room, listening to the same music, seeing the same formats, buying the same clothes, learning the same poses and being shown the same ideas by an algorithm specifically designed to notice what keeps us there.

And somewhere inside all of that, everyone is trying very hard to have a personal brand.

Including me, obviously.

I write stories about my life, put them on Instagram and hope people stop scrolling long enough to read them. I have opinions about authenticity while choosing hashtags. I complain about trends while knowing perfectly well that if someone came up with one tomorrow that I found genuinely funny, I’d probably watch twenty-seven versions of it.

Maybe I’d even make one.

Although if you ever see me turning towards a camera, adjusting my blazer and doing that little Instagram walk, please assume I’ve been taken against my will.

Or that it was kinda chic.

-Sophie Quinn