Instagram Feeds With Quotes

We can miss other things, but we will hardly miss scrolling through our Instagram or Facebook feed. Wherever your audience is, you need to be there.

Rising demands the foundational beliefs of connection and requires wrestling with perspective, meaning, and purpose. I recently came across this quote on Liz Gilbert’s Instagram feed—and I think it sums this up perfectly: “Grace will take you places hustling can’t.

Our thoughts, feelings and whereabouts: Food we dish up on plates called photographs and status updates; to feed Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.; beasts with insatiable appetites.

We are imperfect creatures created with egotistical defects, insecurities and an incomprehensible desire for perfection and the excessive use of social media feeds the raging fires within, most of the time adding salt to wounds we never knew existed and at times creating new ones.

came across this quote on Liz Gilbert's Instagram feed—and I think it sums this up perfectly: “Grace will take you places hustling can’t.

The fear of missing out. It’s the affliction that drives obsessive checking of Twitter feeds, Facebook updates, Instagram stories, WhatsApp groups, and news apps.

A fire burns in the evening sky Breaking like an egg in a pan A sea of yellowish orange spreads In accordance with divine plan.  Vibrant paint drips to the edge Of ashen clouds drifting past The sun is a messy painter Every brush stroke massive and vast. The clouds are like matches Starting as fiery flame Then fading to ashes  A burning passion, tamed.  The red, orange, yellow leaves On the ground in this season Reflect the colors of the sky, and The sunlight that used to feed them.  A September sunset beaming  Down as a sailor's last call A herald for the coming winter A message, enjoy the fleeting fall. 

But that, right there, is why embracing our dirty dessert secrets matters so much. On the surface, they are just hilarious indulgences, but dig down a little deeper than the whipped cream and cherry on top and you'll see that they are powerful reminders to cultivate and celebrate our inner selves as fiercely as we do our LinkedIn profiles and Instagram feeds. Because what good, really, is all that public success and admiration without the private joy at the center?

I wouldn’t be able to write about this for my blog or instagram stories. Not anytime soon at least. Not while it was still so raw. It hurt. And nobody wanted unvarnished pain omg their feed unless it was served up with a side dish of uplift or some kind of lesson.

Facebook automatically catalogued every tiny action from its users, not just their comments and clicks but the words they typed and did not send, the posts they hovered over while scrolling and did not click, and the people's names they searched and did not befriend. They could use that data, for instance, to figure out who your closest friends were, defining the strength of the relationship with a constantly changing number between 0 and 1 they called a "friend coefficient". The people rated closest to 1 would always be at the top of your news feed.

Democrats need to catch up and leapfrog ahead. And this isn’t just about data. We need an “always-on” content distribution network that can match what the right-wing has built. That means an array of loosely connected Facebook pages, Instagram accounts, Twitter feeds, Snapchat stories, and Reddit communities churning out memes, graphics, and videos. More sophisticated data collection and analysis can support and feed this network. I’m no expert in these matters, but I know enough to understand that most people get their news from screens, so we have to be there 24/7.

After embracing minimalism, Dave reduced his persistent social media use down to only a single service, Instagram, which he felt offered significant benefits to his deep interest in art. In true minimalist fashion, however, Dave didn't settle for simply deciding to "use" Instagram; he instead thought hard about how best to integrate this tool into his life. [...] making the experience of checking his feed both fast & meaningful.

Her Instagram feed filled up with gorgeous photos of her creations displayed alongside books, some of their links tenuous at best. Double chocolate cookies made with huge chunks of Valrhona chocolate found their American-Parisian mash-up reference in Alcott's Little Women. Currant cinnamon rolls as big as a baby's head were paired with The Secret Garden. Her lemon-blueberry muffins posed alongside a favorite childhood picture book, Blueberries For Sal.

So, fast-forward to the Smollett post. After I reposted it, and called them out for taking it down, I received an outpouring of thousands of comments and DMs, some even showing videos, of how Instagram was interfering with my following. Some weren’t allowed to like my posts or my father’s. The little heart would light up, and then it would flash back off. Some commented, “Hey Don, I had to follow you three times this week and I never unfollowed you.” With others, it was, “Don, I was blocked out of my account for twenty-four hours for liking one of your feeds.

It seems that we are distracted because we are always in search of something better. We always want to see a different place or a different person’s life, as ours passes us by. We don’t pay attention to our own lives, therefore we want someone else’s. In a way, this is the definition of our social media feed. I want your life; please ‘like’ mine and tell me that it’s good enough. The thing is, most of us live the life that we are searching for. We just aren’t aware enough to see it. We are half present, therefore half appreciative, and our relationships suffer because of it.

Well, sister, here’s the truth, and it may or may not surprise you that I’ve given this answer before, but it remains true. You aren’t going to find the time to pursue your goals; you’re going to make the time to pursue your goals. And the first thing you’re going to need to accept is that you are in control of your schedule. Yes, you, high-level executive. Yes, you, mama of four. Yes, you, college student with twenty-seven events this week. Yes, you, entry-level assistant with a demanding boss. You are in control of your schedule. In fact, there isn’t one thing in your life or your calendar right now that you didn’t allow to be there. Let that sink in for a second. Being overscheduled? That’s on you. Not finding time to feed yourself? You. Spending two hours a night watching TV or scrolling Instagram as a way to relax? Also your choice.

Yet, we are not Skinner's rats. Even Skinner's rats were not Skinner's rats: the patterns of addictive behavior displayed by rats in the Skinner Box were only displayed by rats in isolation, outside of their normal sociable habitat. For human beings, addictions have subjective meanings, as does depression. Marcus Gilroy-Ware's study of social media suggests that what we encounter in our feeds is hedonic stimulation, various moods and sources of arousal- from outrage porn to food porn to porn- which enable us to manage our emotions. In addition that, however, it's also true that we can become attached to the miseries of online life, a state of perpetual outrage and antagonism. There is a sense in which our online avatar resembles a 'virtual tooth' in the sense described by the German surrealist artist Hans Bellmer. In the grip of a toothache, a common reflex is to make a fist so tight that the fingernails bite into the skin. This 'confuses' and 'bisects' the pain by creating a 'virtual center of excitation,' a virtual tooth that seems to draw blood and nervous energy away from the real center of pain. If we are in pain, this suggests, self-harming can be a way of displacing it so that it appears lessened- event though the pain hasn't really been reduced, and we still have a toothache. So if we get hooked on a machine that purports to tell us, among other things, how other people see us- or a version of ourselves, a delegated online image- that suggests something has already gone wrong in our relationships with others. The global rise in depression- currently the world's most widespread illness, having risen some 18 per cent since 2005- is worsened for many people by the social industry. There is a particularly strong correlation between depression and the use of Instagram among young people. But social industry platforms didn't invent depression; they exploited it. And to loosen their grip, one would have to explore what has gone wrong elsewhere.

Three weeks passed, and I didn’t hear from Chelsea again. To be honest, I hadn’t expected to. Felicity’s Instagram feed continued to be populated with images of her in fabulous clubs and restaurants, wearing fabulous clothes, only now she was accompanied less often by Pru – whose own feed informed me that things with Phillip from Toffee were hotting up – and more often by Renzo. Although she hardly ever showed his face in her pictures, there were glimpses of his flat, his car, the back of his head. Each image was like a punch in the stomach, but I couldn’t help looking at them, torturing myself with the knowledge that, if only I’d done things differently, it could have been me with him still. If I hadn’t resorted to webcam work. If I hadn’t told him about it. If I’d been a better girlfriend to him, so that when I told him, he didn’t mind. If I’d had a chance to see him just one more time, and maybe… Round and round the thoughts went in my head, all those pointless, painful ifs

Check Anonybitch.” I open up his Instagram and go to Anonybitch’s page. I see the entry that was below ours, a picture of a passed-out guy with penises permanent-marked all over his face. It’s the top of the feed now. I gasp. The hot tub video is gone! “Peter, how did you do this?” Peter grins a peacocky kind of grin. “I messaged Anonybitch last night and told them to take that shit down or we’re suing. I told them how my uncle is a lawyer and you and I are both underage.” He gives my knee a squeeze. “Is your uncle really a lawyer?” “No. He owns a pizza parlor in New Jersey.” We both laugh, and it feels like such a relief. “Listen, don’t worry about anything today. If anybody says anything, I’ll kick their ass.” “I just wish I knew who did it. I could’ve sworn we were alone that night.” Peter shakes his head. “It’s not like we did anything so wrong! I mean, who cares if we made out in a damn hot tub? Who cares if we had sex in it?” I frown and he quickly says, “I know, I know. You don’t want people thinking we did something when we didn’t. We definitely didn’t, and that’s what I told that bitch Anonybitch.

Being capable and productive feels somewhat beside the point these days. Either you're popular, and therefore exciting and successful and a winner, or you're unpopular, and therefore unimportant and invisible and devoid of redeeming value. Being capable was much more celebrated in the 1970s when I was growing up. People had real jobs that lasted a lifetime back then, and many workers seemed to embrace the promise that if you worked steadily and capably for years, you would be rewarded for it. Even without those rewards, working hard and knowing how to do things seemed like worthwhile enterprises in themselves. "Can she back a cherry pie, Billy Boy, Billy Boy?" my mom used to sing while rolling out pie crust with her swift, dexterous hands. Sexist as its message may have been, the modern version of that song might be worse. It would center around taking carefully staged and filtered photos of your pretty face next to a piece of cherry pie and posting it to your Instagram account, to be rewarded with two thousand red hearts for your efforts. Making food, tasting it, sharing it, understanding yourself as a human who can do things - all of this is flattened down to nothing, now, since only one or two people would ever know about it. Better to feed two thousand strangers an illusion than engage in real work to limited ends.

Dear women, I hope you have the urge to wake up today with a new mindset; Courageous enough to stare back at your reflection ; tearing up all those damn beauty standards of all the models you nonstop see on magazines or those Barbie dolls you keep scrolling on your Instagram home feeds, Fearless enough to have a voice , to take a stand , to say no , to hit back , and to defend your beliefs no matter what. I hope you have the urge to be whatever the hell you want to be no matter how much this stupid society has tried to force you to believe otherwise; Only because you are a WOMAN…

A platform is a raised, level surface on which people or things can stand. A platform business works in just that way: it allows users—producers and consumers of goods, services, and content— to create, communicate, and consume value through the platform. Amazon, Apple’s App Store, eBay, Airbnb, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pay- Pal, YouTube, Uber, Wikipedia, Instagram, etsy, Twitter, Snapchat, Hotel Tonight, Salesforce, Kickstarter, and Alibaba are all platform businesses. While these businesses have done many impressive things, the most relevant to us is that they have created an oppor- tunity for anyone, even those with limited means, to share their thoughts, ideas, creativity, and creations with millions of people at a low cost. Today, if you create a product or have an idea, you can sell that product or share that idea with a substantial audience quickly and cost-effectively through these platforms. Not only that, but the platforms arguably give more power to individuals than corporations since they’re so efficient at identifying ulterior motives or lack of authenticity. The communities on these platforms, many of whom are millennials, know when they’re being sold to rather than shared with, and quickly eliminate those users from their con- sciousness (a/k/a their social media feeds). Now, smaller organizations and less prosperous individuals are able to sell to or share their products, services, or content with more targeted demographics of people. That’s exactly what the modern consumer desires: a more personalized, connected experience. For example, a Brooklyn handbag designer can sell her handbags to a select group of customers through one of the multitude of fashion or shopping platforms and create an ongoing dialogue with her audience through a communication platform such as Instagram. Or an independent filmmaker from Los Angeles can create a short film using a GoPro and the editing software on their Mac and then instantly share it with countless people through one of a dozen video platforms and get direct feedback. Or an author can write a book and sell it directly from his or her website and social channels to anyone who’s excited about it. The reaction to standardization and globalization has been enabled by these platforms. Customers can get what they want, from whomever they want, whenever they want it. It’s a revised and personalized version of globalization that allows us to maintain and enhance the cultural connections that create the meaning we crave in our lives.

Cannelés," Rosie said. Little cakes with a dark, caramelized exterior. They had the shininess of a perfectly glazed donut, and even though Rosie had never had one- you had to have a special pan to make them, a cannelé mold- she knew the inside was supposed to be like custard. "Exactement!" Chef Petit said proudly. "You have had before?" "No," Rosie said, at exactly the same time Bodie said, "Yeah, of course. With Dominique Ansel." Good gravy. Of course Bodie was running around eating cannelés with the man who invented the Cronut. His real life was her Instagram feed. "Please, try." He shook the basket at them. Rosie grabbed one eagerly- it was warm, but not hot. "Cannelés are from Bordeaux, not Paris, but I thought, why not try?" Rosie bit into hers and felt the slight crispness from the caramelized sugar on the exterior give way to a soft interior that was, yes, almost exactly like custard. She could taste vanilla- real vanilla, she had no doubt she'd seen flecks of vanilla beans- and the richness of eggs and milk, and oh, it was just so much better than she'd expected it to be. The contrast between inside and outside was unreal, like a magic trick- a pastry with a secret.

Sandra, I need one of the IT guys to send me the feeds for all of Everly Jensen’s social media accounts.” Wait. What? “She’s a senior at Penn. Grew up in Ridgefield, Connecticut. You should be able to locate her easily enough.” “What are you doing?” I interrupt, confused and annoyed. “Facebook, Twitter, Instagram,” he rattles off. “And whatever other sites college girls are currently using to post selfies on the internet. That will be all, Sandra.” He ends the call with a tap to a control on the steering wheel. “Hello, I’m sitting right here. Did you want me to friend-request you or something?” I wave the phone in my hand as I talk. “Because that”—I point in the direction of the speakers in the dashboard—“was a little melodramatic.

Nicholas is smart, though. He doesn’t push it directly at Vottari. He pushes it through other people Vottari knows and trusts on SnapChat, Instagram, et cetera. They repost it and it keeps showing up in his feeds. That’s it.

As someone who can fall prey to comparing myself and my life to edited and curated Instagram feeds, I laughed so hard when he told me that due to the physics of how grass grows, when we peer over our fence at our neighbor’s grass, it actually does look greener, even if it is truly the same lushness as our own grass. I mean, does it get better than that? The grass actually does look greener on the other side,

Just a few months ago, the comedian Tom Arnold tweeted: “Imagine being Rand Paul’s neighbor and having to deal with @RandPaul lying cowardly circular whiny bullcrap about lawn clippings. No wonder he ripped his toupee off.” Within seconds, Representative Ilhan Omar had retweeted it, obviously gleeful that the attack had taken place. Nice, right? And they say Donald Trump is the one who’s vulgar, but they won’t say anything about Omar allegedly marrying her brother to enter the country illegally. Or, having an affair with a married paid staffer, or as someone hilariously commented on my Instagram feed, “She puts the infidel in infidelity.” Whether it’s true or not, she’s not exactly the moral authority the media makes her out to be.

I understood, too, what was upsetting my supposed benefactors. This wasn't about my work or my Instagram feed, or whatever uncomfortable email or phone call. Ryan and Seth had received this morning from whichever of their corporate partners was currently on edge. This was about the extent to which I would seem to be playing my role. Just as I had come to understand that in the world of Pict it wasn't enough simply to go to work and go home - that there was, in addition, and expectation of some deeper, human contribution - so too, in the context of this programme, this opportunity, it would never be enough simply to point to the material gains I had made. They needed me to be not only successful, but happy, evolved, gratefully aglow. It was my job to make them feel good about themselves and to help them package up that satisfaction for the consumption of others. In my mind, I saw their vision: me, on a podium or stage, perhaps giving a TED talk, gushing about the life in the change in my life they'd occasioned. (p.165)

I could see reminders of why I had cast aside my phone in the first place. I sat in Café Heaven, a lovely little place in the West End of Provincetown, and ate an eggs Benedict. Next to me there were two men in, I guess, their mid-twenties. I shamelessly eavesdropped on their conversation while pretending to read David Copperfield. It was clear they had met on an app, and this was the first time they had seen each other in person. Something about their conversation seemed odd to me, and I couldn’t place it at first. Then I realized they weren’t, in fact, having a conversation at all. What would happen is the first one, who was blond, would talk about himself for ten minutes or so. Then the second one, who was dark-haired, would talk about himself for ten minutes. And they alternated in this way, interrupting each other. I sat next to them for two hours, and at no point did either of them ask the other person a question. At one point, the dark-haired man mentioned that his brother had died a month before. The blond didn’t even offer a cursory “I’m so sorry to hear that”; he simply went back to talking about himself. I realized that if they had met up simply to read out their own Facebook status updates to each other in turn, there would have been absolutely no difference. I felt like everywhere I went, I was surrounded by people who were broadcasting but not receiving. Narcissism, it occurred to me, is a corruption of attention—it’s where your attention becomes turned in only on yourself and your own ego. I don’t say this with any sense of superiority. I am embarrassed to describe what I realized in that week that I missed most about the web. Every day in my normal life—sometimes several times a day—I would look at Twitter and Instagram to see how many followers I had. I didn’t look at the feed, the news, the buzz—just my own stats. If the figure had gone up, I felt glad—like a money-obsessed miser checking the state of his personal stocks and finding he was slightly richer than yesterday. It was as if I was saying to myself, See? More people are following you. You matter. I didn’t miss the content of what they said. I just missed the raw numbers, and the sense that they were growing.

Since Kido had been following her Instagram-linked Facebook feed, he had a general sense of her recent activities.

One of the first scientific papers to write about exercise-induced myokines labeled them “hope molecules.” Ultra-endurance athletes talk about the metaphor of putting one foot in front of the other—how learning that you can take one more step, even when it feels like you can’t possibly keep going, builds confidence and courage. The existence of hope molecules reveals that this is not merely a metaphor. Hope can begin in your muscles. Every time you take a single step, you contract over two hundred myokine-releasing muscles. The very same muscles that propel your body forward also send proteins to your brain that stimulate the neurochemistry of resilience. Importantly, you don’t need to run an ultramarathon across the Arctic to infuse your bloodstream with these chemicals. Any movement that involves muscular contraction—which is to say, all movement—releases beneficial myokines. It seems likely that some ultra-endurance athletes are drawn to the sport precisely because they have a natural capacity to endure. The extreme circumstances of these events allow them to both challenge and enjoy that part of their personality. Yet it’s also possible that the intense physical training contributes to the mental toughness that ultra-endurance athletes demonstrate. Endurance activities like walking, hiking, jogging, running, cycling, and swimming, as well as high-intensity exercise such as interval training, are especially likely to produce a myokinome that supports mental health. Among those who are already active, increasing training intensity or volume—going harder, faster, further, or longer—can jolt muscles to stimulate an even greater myokine release. In one study, running to exhaustion increased irisin levels for the duration of the run and well into a recovery period—an effect that could be viewed as an intravenous dose of hope. Many of the world’s top ultra-endurance athletes have a history of depression, anxiety, trauma, or addiction. Some, like ultrarunner Shawn Bearden, credit the sport with helping to save their lives. This, too, is part of what draws people to the ultra-endurance world. You can start off with seemingly superhuman abilities to endure, or you can build your capacity for resilience one step at a time. Months after I spoke with Bearden, an image from his Instagram account appeared in my feed. It was taken from the middle of a paved road that stretches toward a mountain range, with grassy fields on either side. The sky is blue, except for a huge dark cloud that appears to be hovering directly over the person taking the photo. I remembered how Bearden had described his depression as a black thundercloud rolling in. Under the Instagram photo, Bearden had written, “Tons of wind today, making an easy run far more challenging. So happy to be able to do this. Every day above ground is a good day.” Below, a single comment cheered him on, like a fellow runner on the trail: “Amen to this! Keep striving.

a marked change occurred between 2019 and 2020. The dual crises of the pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests ran slam into the twin dangers of Q-Anon and the consolidation of the Trump paramilitary. In 2019, there were sixty-five incidents of domestic terrorism or attempted violence, but in the run-up to the election in 2020, that number nearly doubled, according to a study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Twenty-one plots were disrupted by law enforcement.5 Violent extremists in the United States and terrorists in the Middle East have remarkably similar pathways to radicalization. Both are motivated by devotion to a charismatic leader, are successful at smashing political norms, and are promised a future racially homogeneous paradise. Modern American terrorists are much more akin to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) than they are to the old Ku Klux Klan. Though they take offense at that comparison, the similarities are quite remarkable. Most American extremists are not professional terrorists on par with their international counterparts. They lack operational proficiency and weapons. But they do not lack in ruthlessness, targets, or ideology. However, the overwhelming number of white nationalist extremists operate as lone wolves. Like McVeigh in the 1990s and others from the 1980s, they hope their acts will motivate the masses to follow in their footsteps. ISIS radicals who abandon their homes and immigrate to the Syria-Iraq border “caliphate” almost exclusively self-radicalize by watching terrorist videos. The Trump insurgents are radicalizing in the exact same way. Hundreds of tactical training videos easily accessible on social media show how to shoot, patrol, and fight like special forces soldiers. These video interviews and lessons explaining how to assemble body armor or make IEDs and extolling the virtues of being part of the armed resistance supporting Donald Trump fill Facebook and Instagram feeds. Some even call themselves the “Boojahideen,” an English take on the Arabic “mujahideen,” or holy warrior. U.S. insurgents in the making often watch YouTube and Facebook videos of tactical military operations, gear reviews, and shooting how-tos. They then go out to buy rifles, magazines, ammunition, combat helmets, and camouflage clothing and seek out other “patriots” to prepare for armed action. This is pure ISIS-like self-radicalization. One could call them Vanilla ISIS.

It was still quite early, but instead of staying in bed and scrolling through my Instagram feed, the way I usually did, I decided to get up and make breakfast.

1. You need to post frequently on your feed.

Within Instagram, you can advertise on the feed as well as in the Stories. Advertising in IG Stories is a great way to further position yourself or your brand within a space that is still pretty new. This

It’s no surprise we’re exhausted. Before we’re even fully awake, we start scrolling through everyone else’s opinions and ideas and solutions—our news feeds, our Facebook page, our Instagram feeds.

After I learned about this, I began to wonder—especially as I interviewed many depressed people—if depression is, in part, a response to the sense of humiliation the modern world inflicts on many of us. Watch TV and you’ll be told the only people who count in the world are celebrities and the rich—and you already know your chances of joining either group are vanishingly small. Flick through an Instagram feed or a glossy magazine, and your normal-shaped body will feel disgusting to you. Go to work and you’ll have to obey the whims of a distant boss earning hundreds of times more than you. Even when we are not being actively humiliated, even more of us feel like our status could be taken away at any moment. Even the middle class—even the rich—are being made to feel pervasively insecure. Robert had discovered that having an insecure status was the one thing even more distressing than having a low status.

Tips on Web Design and Site Marketing Web content is king, which is why we have devoted an entire chapter to it later in this book. It is what draws visitors and ultimately what converts them to customers. So, try to make your web content as engaging as possible. Make sure the content is interactive, unique and educational. Ensure that visitors have the option of plugins while encouraging them to visit as many pages on your site as possible if they want to obtain vital information. The images you use on your website should be both enticing and descriptive in nature. In today’s world, social media is all pervasive. In order to encourage visitors to share your web content, you can include icons of social media platforms on your website. In some select cases, consider integrating social media feeds, like Facebook or Instagram, onto your website so that they can automatically show the latest postings. A "Call-to-Action" can help convert visitors to your site into customers. Always try using a very clear and concise "Call-to-Action" language. Understand what type of conversion you are looking for, and try to provide multiple levels of conversion. For example, a plastic surgeon may provide Schedule an Appointment as a call to action, which will attract only the segment of web visitors who have reached their decision stage. By adding conversion points for visitors who are at earlier stages of their decision making, like signing up for a webcast or your newsletter can help you widen your conversion points and provide inputs to your email marketing. To raise the average amount of time a visitor spends on your website and to minimize the bounce rate, ensure that your website offers a user-friendly and attractive design. This way you will increase the number of links you have on your website and boost its SEO ranking (Tip: While Google’s algorithm is not public, our iterative testing shows that sites with good usability analytics metrics like time on site and bounce rate play favorably in Google’s algorithm, other things remaining constant). Ensure you observe due diligence when designing a website that will enable visitors to navigate in different languages. For example, you may need a lot more space for your menu, as there are languages that use up more space than the English language.

Minimize passive social media usage. Voyeuristically scrolling through the curated news feeds of others on Facebook, Instagram, and other social media platforms can trigger self-defeating, envy-inducing thought spirals. One way to mitigate this outcome is to curb your passive social media usage. Use these technologies actively instead to connect with others at opportune times.

The broad strokes are always similar: manage expectations, maintain boundaries, shore up your other supports, recognize that they will not change, take care of yourself, don’t engage, and get mental health assistance. Expect the football to be pulled away. That means you may protect yourself from some of the disappointment when the ball does get pulled away, or, better yet, don’t play ball with them at all. Doing all these things can take a seemingly uncontrollable soul-sapping situation and transform it into something still exhausting but, at least, predictable. These rules also apply when dealing with the world in general. When politicians make foolish, polarizing, nasty, and divisive comments, recognize that they won’t stop. When your Instagram feed leaves you feeling empty, limit your time with it. When you start feeling down because you are tired of witnessing entitled temper tantrums, frightening road rage, or more reports of cruelty in the world perpetrated by tyrants, narcissists, psychopaths, and other abusive, hostile, and antagonistic people, consider therapy to vent some of those feelings, but give up the idea that you can fix the world. The shifts in the world have normalized and legitimized narcissism, entitlement, and incivility and have given narcissists a sense of new power in the world. They feel emboldened to behave this way because the world appears to be cheering them on or, at least, giving them a very large platform. Increasingly, they also own the platforms, so they also control the message and our collective reality.

Here I have got a family to feed Your ego can wait.

It won’t take many walks with a friend, or pleasantly meandering phone calls, before you begin to wonder why you previously felt it was so important to turn away from the person sitting right in front of you to leave a comment on your cousin’s friend’s Instagram feed.

Then it hits me – I’m talking to this complete stranger like I know him well, because part of me thinks I do know him well. The part of me that’s checked his Instagram feed every morning, noon and night for months.

Instead of sitting on the porch and talking with neighbors and friends as it was in the “good ole days,” often we now enter our homes as the garage door closes behind us, and surrounded by our privacy fence, we eat dinner alone and then vicariously live out community by watching television “reality” shows (as our neighbors do the same). Yet even in our chosen solitude, we have insatiable need for connection. Give us two seconds of down time and we reach for our phone to scan Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram feeds.

¿Por qué no creó Rupert Murdoch The Huffington Post? ¿Por qué no lanzó AT&T Skype, ni Visa creó PayPal? La CNN podría haber creado Twitter, visto que de frases cortas e impactantes como titulares se trata, ¿no? General Motors o Hertz podrían haber lanzado Uber, y Marriott, Airbnb. Gannett podría haber creado Craigslist o Kijiji. Yellow Pages podría haber fundado perfectamente eBay. Microsoft tenía la posibilidad de crear Google o cualquier modelo de negocio basado en internet más que en el ordenador personal. ¿Por qué no inventó la NBC YouTube? Sony podría haberse adelantado al iTunes de Apple. ¿Dónde estaba Kodak cuando se inventaron Instagram o Pinterest? ¿Y si People o Newsweek hubieran creado BuzzFeed o Mashable?

Consuming pop culture is my job. Well, writing about it is my job, but that makes keeping tabs on movies, television, podcasts, Twitter/Instagram feeds, and everything else a professional necessity. Yet, there's one high-protein item that always seems to be missing in my media diet: books. It's not that I don't read them—I've got two to three going at any given time—it's that I feel like I don't read them enough. How do I know this? Fucking Goodreads.

Smiling to myself, I pictured our family one sunny afternoon last fall. It had been a warm day, and we were on our way to the city aquarium. Dad had the car windows rolled down, and I recalled the feel of the wind in my hair and the scent of Mom’s perfume wafting from the seat in front of me. Mom and Dad were chatting and I was scrolling through my Instagram feed. But the moment the song sounded on the radio, I squealed. “Turn it up!” I said, leaning forward in my seat, enough that the belt tightened across my chest. As soon as Dad reached over and turned the knob, I started singing the lyrics aloud. Both Mom and Dad joined in. With the wind in my hair and the music filling the car, a warmth had filled my insides, almost as if I were wrapped in my favorite fuzzy blanket. The memory was fresh in my mind and I could still see Mom’s head bob up and down as she sang while Dad tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. “Come on, Dad!” I said, giggling. “Sing with us.” He glanced over his shoulder at me. “I’m waiting for my favorite part. I don’t want to stretch my singing muscles.” “What singing muscles?” Mom smiled at him. He put a finger in the air for her to wait. “Here we go.” When the chorus of the song began, Dad screeched out the lyrics in a really high voice. He was trying to mimic the singer’s voice but he wasn’t even close and the sound he made was terrible. I burst out laughing. He ignored me and continued to sing, all the while, waving a hand through the air with wide flourishes, as if conducting an orchestra. He tilted his head back and belted out the high notes. When we pulled up at a red traffic light and the car slowed to a stop, Dad was oblivious of the carload of people alongside us watching him. The passengers of the other car had their windows open too and I stared at them in horror. Their eyes were glued to Dad and they shook their heads and rolled their eyes. “Dad!” I called to him. “Those people are watching you.” But he didn’t hear me and continued to sing. I sank into my seat, my cheeks flushing. He finally realized he had an audience but instead of being embarrassed, he waved to them. “Hello, there!” he said. “Did you enjoy my singing?” The light turned green, and the carload of people cracked up laughing as their car lurched forward in their hurry to escape the weird man in the car next to theirs. Dad shrugged. “I guess not.’ Mom and I burst out laughing too, unable to hold it in any longer. Dad waved a dismissive hand. “They wouldn’t know good music if it hit them in the face.” Tears sprang from my eyes because I was laughing so hard. My dad could be so embarrassing sometimes, but that day, it didn’t bother me at all. Dad had always managed to make me laugh at the silliest things. He had a way of making me feel happy, regardless of what mood I was in. Deep down I thought he was a really cool dad. My friends thought so too. He wasn’t boring and super strict like their dads. He was fun to be around and everyone loved him for it, including my friends. Our little family was perfect, and I wouldn’t have changed it for the world.

The Hidden Treasure The kingdom of Heaven is like treasure buried in a field. A man was so busy scrolling through his Instagram feed that he walked right over it without ever knowing of its existence. However, he did see some great memes that made him laugh.

Watch TV and you’ll be told the only people who count in the world are celebrities and the rich—and you already know your chances of joining either group are vanishingly small. Flick through an Instagram feed or a glossy magazine, and your normal-shaped body will feel disgusting to you. Go to work and you’ll have to obey the whims of a distant boss earning hundreds of times more than you.

This coupling of market forces and the crowd’s demand for publicity means that everyone dreams of monetizing their Instagram feed. And that effectively becomes the ethos of a society.

You are like a baby bird that has fallen out of the nest, too weak and fragile to fly back. You need to learn how to feed yourself soul vitamins so that you can regain your energy and the will to live fully.

friends from high school turned up their noses when they found out about my job, yet they’re the ones who fill their Instagram feeds with half-naked shots of themselves at the shore. Such hypocrites.

Already, when Facebook bought Instagram, it felt as though the walls of the Internet were closing in a little tighter around us users. The broad expanse of possibility, of messiness, on a network like Geocities or the personal expression of Tumblr was shut down. Digital life became increasingly templated, a set of boxes to fill in rather than a canvas to cover in your own image. (You don’t redesign how your Facebook profile looks; you just change your avatar.) I felt a certain sense of loss, but at first the trade-off of creativity for broadcast reach seemed worthwhile: You could talk to so many people at once on social media! But that exposure became enervating, too, and I missed the previous sense of intimacy, the Internet as a private place—a hideout from real life, rather than the determining force of real life. As the walls closed in, the algorithmic feeds took on more and more influence and authority.