no one cares what cover photo you choose for your photo dump.

casual instagram is (sometimes) a lie.

I’m sitting across from the other girl working at my internship. This girl, let’s call her Ellie, and I have become rather close throughout the semester and in between assignments we talk about everything from relationships to eating disorders to lesbianism. Neither of us are lesbians*, but it’s important to leave no stone unturned. You understand.

Today my friend wants to post a photo dump on Instagram. But she’s very troubled because which photo should be the cover photo? She shows me the various options. I say something to the effect of it doesn’t really matter. But for her, it does. It matters a lot. And I’d argue that everyone in Gen Z and maybe even some millennials have been there time and time again. I 100% – nay… 1000% have. I don’t know why I said nay. It just leaked out of my typing fingers like an air mattress with a hole in it. I think I’m sorry about it but haven’t decided yet.

Choosing the cover photo for your photo dump is very important, you guys. This is an essential part of the very thing that’s going to prove once and for all that you don’t care about social media, you’re not as vain and concerned with how you’re perceived as all those other losers on the app, and that Instagram is indeed casual again, just like Teen Vogue said it would be. You don’t want to fuck it up.

The cover photo is the first photo your followers are going to see while they’re scrolling through their feeds. This is, more importantly, the photo people – strangers, even – are going to see when they click on your profile and scroll through your grid. Choosing the wrong one could be the difference between 5 and 7 comments.

And then, oh my God, which photo from your photo dump should you choose when you share the post on your story in case people didn’t see it, in case they scrolled past it because you didn’t choose the right cover photo?

There is a lot at stake here.

I tell Ellie she can’t go wrong, 1) because it’s true and 2) because I’m trying to work on something and I am just trying to get her off my back. And I understand that from the outside, it seems so stupid. Truly no one cares. Most people probably aren’t going to even scroll through all the photos of your photo dump, let alone analyze the order of them and which photos probably would’ve been better as the cover photo.

That’s the thing though. It’s easy to say that social media doesn’t matter, to see all of this as trivial when it’s not you. But I have been Ellie. Because to be Ellie is to be a young person alive in this moment of history. To be on social media at all is to buy into the validation machine in some way, shape, or form, and most of us are doing it every day whether we recognize it as such or not.

I know I’m in a bad spot with social media when it starts to feel like it matters, when the algorithm has some effect on my mood or self-esteem. When a post of mine gets a lot of likes and comments, it feels good. When it doesn’t, my confidence might take a hit depending on the mood I’m in. And that “depending on the mood I’m in” is crucial.

For anyone who grew up on the internet, particularly Gen Z, you know that shit used to be a journal. For some of my friends in their early 20s, it still is. Being put on someone’s Close Friends often feels like you’ve been involuntarily subscribed to their diary; you’re hit with the same feeling of “I feel like I’m not supposed to be reading this…” when you see their posts.

I remember in high school people had not only second accounts known as “finstas,” accounts made for close friends where people could post without the pressure to be aesthetically pleasing, but some people even had “thrinstas,” which was the name for a third, even more exclusive, account. I never understood that. Like, why are we not just buying a journal?

But as a follower of some of these accounts, you were privy to someone’s most vulnerable, private thoughts. People posting about how insecure they are, their complicated family dynamics, and wanting to kill themselves.

Now, if you’ve just posted about how suicidal you are and you know people saw it but didn’t like, comment, or reach out – people who you consider your closest friends – that would feel pretty bad, right? It’s not “people don’t care about my selfie,” it’s “people don’t care about my life.”

All this to say, I think the mental space someone is in when posting on social media plays a huge role in how important their followers’ response to it feels. The reason the decision of which photo my friend should use as the cover photo of her photo dump feels so important is because, for her, it is. How this post performs will carry some weight over how she feels about herself.

That’s the problem, and it’s one so many of us have. And that’s not a judgment! I have it too.

I truly believe that if you have a rich life outside of social media, with meaningful friendships and relationships that primarily exist off-screen, with hobbies and interests that add novelty and meaning to your life, and with ways of measuring your self-worth that have nothing to do with an algorithm, social media feels a lot less important than it does for someone whose primary means of connection with the world happen on TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram. But for so many of us, that is our primary connection with the world. Not necessarily by choice, but because the lines between real life and the internet have become so blurred in the past decade that to escape one feels like, by default, escaping the other.

If you’re not online, do you even exist? I grapple with this question almost daily.

And the irony is that all of this decision making about which cover photo to use is for a post that is intended to show how much we don’t care about social media. Casual Instagram is, at the end of the day, still as much a performance as Instagram that is clearly curated and obviously thought out. Why are we pretending that every post is not, in some way, a bid to influence others’ perceptions of us in one way or another? Maybe you want to be seen as funny, as intelligent, as effortlessly beautiful. But in some way, you want to be seen.

It is less so that it seems cool not to care about social media, and more so that it is seen as weak and pathetic to care about social media.

“Instagram is casual now, haven’t you heard? Now which photo do you guys should I use as the cover photo for my photo dump?”

Hard truth: The post that you put so much time and energy into curating probably won’t be looked at for more than 1-2 seconds by 99.99% of the people who see it. A lot of people probably won’t scroll through all the photos in your photo dump. And I’m almost entirely certain that most people are not listening to the song you put over the selfie you posted on your story, even though choosing the right 15 seconds of said song felt like a really important decision when you uploaded it.

Yes, a lot of us care about how we are perceived and make efforts both online and off to influence that perception. I think that is part of what makes us human. But we have to remember that the phone carries exactly the amount of importance we give to it. As much as social media tries to pull us in with immediate gratification and dopamine hits, ultimately we make that decision. Because there is a cost to giving likes and comments too much power, and that cost is our lives.

*I did my time in the lesbian community from ages 20-22 but was dishonorably discharged when I realized I was, in fact, bisexual as I had thought I was in my teenage years. All love to the community though, lesbians are some of the best people on earth and I feel lucky to know and love so many.