“Life Update”
We may speculate that the dominance of the “photo dump” on instagram and similar platforms is a response to a common experience: exhaustion at the prospect of continuing to curate regular, smaller posts intended to construct or maintain the performance of a successful and full life. We find these oversized dumps of imagery representing months or even years of a users life cathartic as we ourselves feel the pressure of our photo roll continuing to build up a backlog of significant experiences we have yet to document online for our real and imagined audience.
The sense of obligation to document and paralysis about doing so is rooted in the dissonance of on the one hand craving the dopamine hit of likes, comments, validation and perception, and the platform age anxiety that it will all sink without a trace in a hostile sea of algorithmic feeds without generating any of the attention one craves.
In this author’s experience, the swelling photo roll is accompanied by a folder full of in progress and unpublished creative experiments, each of which buzzes with that same dissonance. Is this my best work yet? Will it fail to be seen since I’ve been “so shitty about posting”? Should I wait for a bigger project to use these forms and ideas? Should I be selling this somehow? For the sin of insufficient hustle, am I damned to obscurity?
Written without much editing or reflection on the author’s couch prior to their daily morning walk to the bodega to get a Red Bull, a routine they adopted to force themselves not to rot during their summer 2025 severance vacation.