Is anyone else tired of the internet?

I want to talk about something a bit different today. It’s a bit of a tangent from the usual, but it’s been sitting in my head for a while now and I need to get it out.

Back in 2012 or so, I started posting on Instagram with no strategy and no idea what a hook was. I just shared what was on my mind – mostly what I was learning, what I was struggling with and what felt true that day. There was no funnel, no content pillars, no plan to speak of at all.

But it worked. Not in the sense that my account grew to 100k followers in 90 days, but in the sense that people actually felt something. I’d get messages from followers telling me a post had shifted something for them, or landed on exactly the day they needed it. There was a real and wonderful engaged community there, built slowly and on nothing more than showing up as myself.

That era feels like a different platform now. Maybe it was.

After a very on/off relationship with social media over the past few years, I’ve come back to Instagram recently. I wanted to create in that same spirit of authenticity, spontaneity and being service-led. But I’m finding it hard going; not because the creating itself has changed, but because of the noise around it.

Every second piece of content on my feed is about “growing on social media”. It’s all about hooks, virality and “what you need to be doing right now to get X”.

It’s not that this advice is wrong – some of it clearly works, algorithmically. It’s that everyone is doing it. Which means everyone is starting to sound the same, look the same and structure their posts the same.

Scroll for five minutes and see how many accounts open with the same three words. It’s not a coincidence – it’s a formula, applied by thousands of people at once. I think the result is a kind of flattening.

I don’t think this is a me-being-precious thing either. I think it’s part of why the web revival movement has been gaining so much traction – an internet revolution that I LOVE, centred around people building slower, individual corners of the internet again, like blogs, newsletters and small forums (Geocities, anyone?).

People are hungry for something that doesn’t feel manufactured.

I don’t have a neat lesson to hand you here. What I keep coming back to is this: the platforms reward sameness, but the thing that actually connects people – the thing I felt in those early years – was never the format. We resonate with what feels true, inspired and allows us to feel seen.

Maybe the answer isn’t to leave, and it isn’t to play the game either. Maybe it’s to be deliberately, stubbornly original inside a feed built for sameness. To let my posts look and feel like nothing else in your feed that day, purely because I’m purposefully ignoring my own homogeneous feed and creating what feels true in the moment.

There’s something almost rebellious about that right now.

Kinda chic, even, to have an original thought.

I don’t know exactly where I’ll land with this; I’m unsure whether I’ll keep showing up on Instagram, or how often. I’m not trying to resolve that here. What I am curious about is where you’ve landed.

Are you still on social media? Has your relationship with it changed? What keeps you there, or what took you off it?

I’d love to know I’m not the only one thinking about this – drop me a message and tell me.