Why Are You Just Making Stuff for Instagram?

Let’s be brutally honest for a moment: most of what’s being created online today isn’t art—it’s content. And there’s a difference.

Art comes from a personal place. It tells a story. It stretches across time. It can be weird, unpolished, defiant, or intimate. But content? Content is created to feed a system. It’s built for clicks, algorithms, likes, and reach. It’s meant to be skimmed—not felt. Swiped past—not sat with.

And it shows.

Last night, I couldn’t sleep, I just felt like I can’t move my work forward, and it feels bleaking looking at so many successful creatives, when it feels like things are stalling for me. I love my work, but it can be hard sometimes when you look at all these metrics that we’re meant to measure up to.

We’re not creating to express ourselves anymore—we’re creating to survive digital irrelevance. We’re making things that keep us “present” on platforms designed to forget us the second we stop performing.

When the Platform Becomes the Point

Instagram doesn’t care about your story, your craft, your vulnerability, or the risks you took to make something honest. It doesn’t reward nuance. It rewards retention, performance, and consistency. That’s it.

So if your content gets saved, shared, or replayed—great. You’re rewarded with reach. If not, good luck clawing your way back into relevance.

That means the work that gets seen is rarely the work that matters. It’s the work that conforms. That adapts to the latest trend, uses trending audio, mimics the most engaging structure, and optimises the thumbnail. It’s photos with your face front and centre. Reels that open with a hook. Captions that are digestible in three seconds or less. Even vulnerability becomes formulaic: “I wasn’t going to post this, but…”

It’s a cycle of creative burnout dressed up as content strategy.

But when you strip your voice, your aesthetic, your story down to fit a trending format, who are you really making that work for?

You? Or the algorithm?

I really liked this larger point from my friend Campbell, aka. Struthless who I met in my third year of university, and whose videos are something I adore that he puts out, and would thoroughly recommend his books you can buy here:

Aesthetic Without Substance: The Hollowing Out of Art

We’ve reached a point where content has become a mimicry of art. It looks like expression, but it’s been run through a dozen layers of filtration—literally and figuratively—until there’s no edge left. No weirdness. No risk. Just polish.

And once that polish wears off, what are we left with?

A hollow aesthetic. An echo of meaning.

You can see it everywhere. On Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest. Everyone’s shooting at the same beaches. Everyone’s using the same colour grades. Everyone’s quoting the same poems in captions. And everyone’s slowly becoming indistinguishable from everyone else.

Originality has been sacrificed for performance.

On Theft, Credit, and the Loudest Voice in the Room

One of the most disheartening parts of making work online is realising that visibility often trumps originality. We see it all the time—someone quietly builds something beautiful, thoughtful, and deeply resonant… and then someone louder repackages it for the algorithm, gets the credit, and trademarks the movement. Whether it’s Mel Robbins trademarking “Let Them” after Cassie Phillips’ viral poem sparked a quiet groundswell of meaning for thousands—or any of the countless artists, writers, and thinkers whose work gets lifted without attribution—it’s the same dynamic: the most popular person gets the legacy, not the most honest one. I’m not here to litigate who owns what, but I am saying this—if you’re making something real, do it in your name. And if you’re inspired by someone else’s work? Credit them. Create responsibly. Because the stories that go viral aren’t always the ones that started the fire.

For more on this issue, you can read Cassie Phillips’ original post on Facebook, a detailed breakdown via Sage Justice on Substack, or browse the ongoing discussion on Reddit for a fuller picture.

Monoculture and the Death of Divergence

And this isn’t just a photography problem. It’s cultural.

Platforms like Instagram and TikTok don’t just reward similarity—they demand it. The more your work mirrors what’s already working, the more likely it is to “perform.” And slowly, without realising it, creators start creating for sameness.

That’s how monoculture is born.

I read recently about this from Author Malcolm Gladwell, in his new book Revenge of the Tipping Point, Gladwell talks about monocultures in the context of mental health. He writes about an affluent American town nicknamed called Poplar Grove where the pressure to be perfect created a psychological minefield for teenagers. Everyone was expected to be high-achieving, high-performing, attractive, and aspirational. Those who couldn’t keep up—or who simply didn’t fit—weren’t just left out. They were crushed by the weight of not measuring up.

Gladwell calls out something important: monocultures look tidy and aspirational on the surface. But they’re dangerous. Because they leave no space for difference.

And that same dynamic is unfolding online.

If your work doesn’t trend, it’s invisible. If it’s not formatted for reels, it gets buried. If it doesn’t follow the expected beat or match the dominant aesthetic, it’s seen as “low engagement” and gets pushed aside.

So you either adapt—or you fade.

And in doing so, we all lose something irreplaceable: the rough edges, the experimentation, the unique point of view that art is supposed to reflect.

Dead Internet, Hollow Engagement

Here’s where it gets even more unhinged.

The Dead Internet Theory suggests that most of the internet we’re engaging with isn’t even made by humans anymore. It’s bots. It’s AI-generated filler. It’s content mills pumping out SEO garbage. It’s fake engagement to inflate metrics. And it’s becoming harder and harder to tell what’s authentic.

If you’re pouring your heart into a project and it’s getting lost in a sea of artificially boosted nonsense, it’s not your fault. You’re not failing to connect—the system is failing to support connection.

You’re not alone in feeling like you’re shouting into a void.

You are.

Creating Work That Transcends the Feed

So what’s the solution?

Start by connecting with real people, in the real world, creating stuff that requires connection.

Make things that don’t need to go viral.

Make things that mean something to you—even if they don’t trend.

Make work that wouldn’t survive the algorithm—and be proud of that.

Write the long captions. Post the blurry film photos. Create series that unfold slowly. Design zines. Curate galleries. Print your work. Blog your process. Tell the story that’s never been told the way you see it.
Build a body of work that could live on long after your Instagram account is gone.

Because if we’re just creating to “perform,” we’re missing the whole point. Real art—the kind that lasts—isn’t performative. It’s personal. It doesn’t shout for attention. It pulls people in.

You’ll probably find, as I have, much of the work, when you take it off Instagram fails to live up to its own hype, it’s cheap, and there often isn’t much thought, reason or nuance behind it.

This Isn’t About Quitting Instagram

Let me be clear: this isn’t a call to delete the app.

Use Instagram. Post your work. Market your services. Build an audience. But don’t let the platform define your practice.

Your worth as a photographer, a writer, a model, or an artist isn’t measured in saves or shares or how many times someone reposted your work to their story.

It’s measured in the risks you take. The stories you tell. The things you say that no one else is saying.

You don’t need to keep up.

You need to go deeper.

The Real Question

So the next time you’re creating something—stop and ask yourself:

Am I making this because it matters to me?

Or because I’m afraid of being forgotten by an algorithm?

If it’s the latter, take a breath. Step away. Start again.

Create something that wouldn’t work as a Reel.

Make something that couldn’t be swiped past.

Build something that will still feel honest five years from now.

Because the goal isn’t to be everywhere.

The goal is to make something that stays with someone—even if it’s just one person.

Want More Like This?

You can explore other essays like this over on my blog. If you’re a model, photographer, or creative trying to build work with more depth, I’ve written some guides to help you break the noise and create for yourself—not just the feed.

If this resonated, consider sharing it, or checking out my magazine, where I publish film editorials, travel shoots, and long-form photo stories that live outside the algorithm.

And if you’d like to support the kind of work that doesn’t always trend—but tries to matter—you can do that here.

Thanks for reading.