By Asma Siddiqui

Copyright vogue

Using Instagram these days feels like a humiliation ritual. That’s not to say I don’t love the app—I really do. It’s the sole reason my screen time shoots up to an embarrassing 10+ hours on some days. But every time there’s an update, something I enjoy is replaced with a feature I never asked for. It’s as if the app knows exactly what will annoy me most, does it anyway, and I, irritated and humiliated, keep going back to it. Just like that annoying situationship who keeps showing up at the exact moment I think I’ve finally gotten over him.
Some of Instagram’s crimes are so evil they are burnt into my memory: The “upgraded” fonts and Create mode slides. The removal of third-party filters. The curved borders when you upload a post to your story. An icon with your profile picture floating above a Reel you like, as if Instagram wasn’t already performative enough. The new reposting feature that has me looking like an idiot because I keep reposting random reels by accident. The AI chat profiles on a platform made to connect us to each other. Oh and also, the ads. If you’re lucky, you get three actual stories before the next one tries to sell you something.
Instagram used to be an app for sharing photos and making friends. These days, it feels like it’s trying to be everything. Newer updates, like Blends and the Friends tab, come across as clumsy attempts to mimic a sense of community and keep the group chat online for longer. There’s even a “bring back the squares” movement online, and I get it—randomly changing everyone’s feed from squares to rectangles is just ragebait at this point. Open the Instagram subreddit and all the top posts are complaints. The most popular one on the entire subreddit is actually titled “New Instagram Update Is Horrible / Rant.”
And yet, despite all the complaining, we haven’t stopped using it. Instagram is our archive, our address book, our journal. We share the biggest moments of our lives on this app. It’s where I met so many of my best friends, my boyfriend, even got my job. A recent Vogue India article noted that many people now have to depend on social media—especially Instagram—to launch their writing careers. The app has become essential to our lives in unexpected and unprecedented ways.
That said, complaining about fonts or ratios isn’t trivial or merely an aesthetic gripe. When Instagram unexpectedly takes something away and adds something new, it’s upsetting because it feels like more than a simple interface change. It shakes the stage on which our lives are performed. It reminds us who really holds the reins, making it clear that a multinational technology company is toying with us, just because it can. The real reason Instagram keeps reshaping itself is to pull us in with new features and tools, giving us endless excuses to scroll longer and keep watching. Each feature is insidiously engineered to keep us absorbed and to stoke constant FOMO. The illusion of connection masks the fact that these additions rarely bring anything meaningful.
And yet, despite all this stimulation, all we really want is to genuinely connect with each other. In the post-pandemic era, the thrill of being online has worn off; the novelty of digital intimacy has faded, buried under gimmicky updates and cheap tricks. What largely remains is performance, posturing and metrics we cannot seem to escape. With every upgrade, we are offered more ways to get a quick dopamine hit. But none of them provide what we really crave—a genuine way to connect that we had before.
As life for many becomes heavier year after year, we long for simpler times. The grass always looks greener in our old Instagram posts. Maybe it’s not just the square photos we miss. We miss an era when the internet was smaller, sillier, cosier, less performative. When the internet felt like home. The real point isn’t the loss of a font or the changing ratios, but the fact that our lives are so deeply entwined with an app that can no longer meaningfully serve us.
This is the paradox: we are growing to resent Instagram, yet leaving feels impossible, because so much of our life is tied to it. So we keep logging in, like we’re trapped in a nasty situationship. We swear we’ve had enough, but we are unable to actually walk away. It keeps changing to manipulate us into deeper engagement, but in the process, it erodes the very thing we came for. Instagram is the bad boyfriend we want to quit. We complain, we threaten to leave, but we still stay. Maybe one day, we’ll finally end it for good.

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