Why Do We Post on Social Media?

Recently I went on a two-week vacation with two friends in a small city along the ocean, three hours' drive from Bangkok. We had a great time. On the last night I started composing my next Instagram post, picking the highest moment during the stay by carefully selecting the shots that would drive me the most attention. But just before publishing, something hit me like never before.

Why do I feel this compulsive urge to post this carousel?

A simple question should have a simple answer, right? Not always. Not in this case. To answer it, I had to build a small boat and cross an uncharted sea, where I almost got eaten by big fish.

I ended up not posting. I deleted the draft.

Following that day, I haven't looked at social media the same way. I just started asking simple questions: why are we posting on social media? The publish button looks innocent. You just want to press it. But have you ever asked what you're even pressing for? Why does it seem so important to show my Chinese noodles on my story?

The same night, I started asking questions, as I always do, and one of them had more weight to it: what would it feel like if I didn't post it? I immediately had a strange feeling of emptiness. Digging into it, I wrote: "Does it count if I don't show it? I go on some vacation, and then suddenly I need to post something. I mean, why?"

Not posting would have felt like it never existed, almost like a waste of time. As if posting were harvest day, and the natural thing to do. Why spend time enjoying life if I can't get something out of it? What's that "something"? After those thoughts, I was hooked. I had to find out.

That sentence is the one that actually mattered to me, even more than the vacation did. It would feel like it "didn't happen." Let's look inside. The trip happened. I was there. I have the memory — the long barefoot run on the beach that made my feet bleed, the borderline joke from a friend I didn't enjoy, and the long, challenging Dostoevsky reading in the hammock. Those things happened, and they belong to the past. If so, why does it feel like it needs something extra to close the loop?

Here is the only explanation I found: my mind wasn't questioning whether the trip happened. Of course it did. It was just concerned whether it had been seen. Every New Year's Eve, it always strikes me how many people record the fireworks without ever really looking at them — only through their screens, just to make sure they got it on camera. It's kind of strange. The recorded life has become more important than the living life. So here comes the question: what the fuck is going on?

There are probably multiple layers to it, and I'm not an expert in any of them, but my mind has flirted with these ideas for quite a while, and I think I've caught the fish. In the environment that built us — tribes, no phones — what you did only mattered if people saw it. Survival was everything, and so was status within the tribe. If you misbehaved or messed up and got kicked off, good luck surviving on your own. Even if it was useful, you didn't just hunt deer to eat — you hunted to be seen as the man who hunted it successfully. Benefits would come with it: mating opportunities, strategic allies, and so on — to be short, you'd have better chances of survival if people respected you, because they'd help you survive.

Surely we don't live in the same environment anymore — back then it was a piece of cloth protecting our sex, now it's shoes and a jacket — and we don't hunt deer anymore, but the survival mechanism is still there, just running in a completely different setting. We don't hunt deer, but we go to fancy restaurants, have vacations, and get new promising jobs. The form of status has changed while the need to be seen as valuable has stayed the same.

So you would have guessed: it comes down to signaling. I did this, I did that, look how cool I am. It's about signaling that you are somebody legitimate and valuable.

In my small vacation, the "something" I would get from posting that carousel would be the same as if I were hunting a deer. But now it's much less useful, and trivial, since that mechanism was really essential in small communities where food wasn't stocked on shelves. We are so used to it now. We post, and there's no sense of community anymore. Your cool-moment posts are kind of futile — they don't bring you the social status you crave, but your mind doesn't get that yet.

The hardware hasn't had the time to update. We're still running the same system from hundreds of thousands of years ago.

So no, I'm not going to tell you to quit Instagram and go live in a cave. It's more nuanced than that. Even if you post because some part of you wants to be seen doing it — that's fine. It's not right or wrong, it's just the hardware doing its job. For me, once I saw why I wanted to post that carousel, I couldn't unsee it, and that's what made me delete the draft. But posting it anyway, fully aware of the why, would have been just as fine.

The point was never to stop. It's to see it. Once you see it, you have a sense of choice. Personally, understanding a little more, every day, about my actions, my feelings, what I do and why. It gives me a sense of truth — like I'm getting closer to something real. Whether that seed grows into something bigger, or just sits there, isn't up to me to decide.

You don't need to live in a cave, or spend your life questioning everything you do. But putting a little light on your blind spots can make your life more grounded — and a little more meaningful everyday.