“My close friends who aren’t influencers, they haven’t posted in, like, two years.”Īs is always the case, the ick came about quite suddenly-things were going great for Instagram, until they just weren’t. “People who aren’t influencers only use to watch other people make big announcements,” Lee Tilghman, a former full-time Instagram influencer, told me over the phone. In other words, Instagram is giving us the ick: that feeling when a romantic partner or crush does something small but noticeable-like wearing a fedora-that immediately turns you off forever. To do so earnestly suggests a blithe unawareness of your surroundings, like shouting into the phone in public. Participating means throwing pictures into a void, which is why it’s become kind of cringe. Simply being on Instagram is a very different thing from actively engaging with it. “They don’t want to be on it, but they feel it’s weird if they’re not.” In fact, a recent Piper Sandler survey found that, of 14,500 teens surveyed across 47 states, only 20 percent named Instagram their favorite social-media platform (TikTok came first, followed by Snapchat). “Gen Z’s relationship with Instagram is much like millennials’ relationship with Facebook: Begrudgingly necessary,” Casey Lewis, a youth-culture consultant who writes the youth-culture newsletter After School, told me over email. To scroll through Instagram today is to parse a series of sponsored posts from brands, recommended Reels from people you don’t follow, and the occasional picture from a friend that’s finally surfaced after being posted several days ago. “I don’t even have it on my phone anymore,” the other confessed.Įven just a couple of years ago, it would have been unheard-of for these 20-something New Yorkers to shrug off Instagram-a sanctimonious lifestyle choice people would have regretted starting a conversation about at that party they were headed to. “Does she have Instagram?” one asked, before adding with a laugh: “Does anybody?” They were young and cool-intimidatingly so, dressed in the requisite New York all black, with a dash of Y2K revival-and trying to figure out how to find a mutual acquaintance online. Earlier this fall, while riding the subway, I overheard two friends doing some reconnaissance ahead of a party.

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