Psychology of People Who Don’t Post Their Photos on Social Media

The Psychology of People Who Don’t Post Photos on Social Media

Also on the blog: The Psychology of People Who Don’t Post Photos on Social Media

In 2016 I lived in a house in San Jose with three awesome women. We were all single and constantly in each other’s lives, so my dating decisions had a kind of informal review board. It met in the kitchen and had no reason to be as entertained by my problems as it was.

When I told them I didn’t use social media, they gave me shit immediately. To them, a guy with no Instagram was a red flag. What if he was married? What if he had an entire second family and a suspicious number of matching Christmas pajamas?

“WHAT ARE YOU HIDING, EDGAR?” was the question.

I loved them. They were absolutely fucking right to ask, lol. A profile isn’t a background check, but I understood why a woman trying to figure out whether a guy was normal would want some evidence that he existed outside the two-hour window of a date.

Between 2015 and 2020, I could sometimes feel the social-media question coming before it arrived. A few women were obviously put off when I said I didn’t have anything to show them. Others gave me the very polite “good for you” response, with the facial expression of someone being told that the appetizer is made entirely of moss.

Honestly, it was useful information for me too. If I explained why I wasn’t on there and the lack of an account was still an immediate dealbreaker, that told me something about whether we’d be a good fit. We each got our red flag. Very efficient date.

I wasn’t born above any of this

When social media first appeared, I wasn’t particularly interested. Then a lot of my friends got into it, so I joined. Over time it started making me feel bad about myself, though I didn’t have enough self-awareness then to recognize what was happening. I just knew I’d open an app, come out later feeling slightly worse, and somehow decide to open it again tomorrow.

I wasn’t sitting there consciously ranking my life against everybody else’s. That would at least have been an honest use of my time. It was more like absorbing a hundred tiny comparisons while pretending I was only checking whether someone had posted a picture of their dog.

We’ve always compared ourselves to other people. The apps just gave us access to everyone’s most flattering Tuesday and put it up against our actual Tuesday, which includes dishes, emails, and a refrigerator making a noise you’ve decided to ignore until it becomes a financial event.

Then in 2017, one of my best friends got tired of screenshotting memes and texting them to me. He kept nudging me to get back on Instagram, and I stupidly complied. I made a new rule: I could have the account, but I wouldn’t post anything.

That rule was like deciding you’re going to hang out in a casino but not put your face on the promotional billboard. Technically a boundary. Not the one that mattered.

I spent another few years doomscrolling, buying sneakers I did not need, and getting mad about news stories I had zero control over. I could have spent the evening talking to a friend. Instead I knew far too much about a stranger’s argument and had a new pair of shoes on the way.

The empty profile doesn’t tell you why it’s empty

My video gets into the psychology of people who don’t post, and the part I keep coming back to is that two people can have the exact same empty profile for opposite reasons.

One person might have had a great day, told their wife or a friend, maybe sent a photo to the group chat, and felt no need to put it in front of 200 more people. They already know the day was good. The likes wouldn’t improve the sunset.

Another person might care a lot about what other people think, and that’s exactly why they don’t post. Once a picture goes up, it can become a little administrative task: Did I look weird? Is the caption too earnest? Why did that one person see it and not like it? Does my aunt think this is an announcement?

Same blank grid. Completely different internal meeting.

Psychologists talk about self-presentation, which is just the way we adjust what we show people depending on who we think is watching. Online, the possible audience can include your best friend, a former coworker, someone you dated once, and a guy from high school whose name you only remember because he still watches every story. That’s a lot of people to mentally seat around a dinner table.

You can be on Waikiki Beach and spend the sunset moving three feet to the left because a stranger is in the frame, checking the light, trying a second take, and realizing your vacation has somehow acquired a director. The guy is you. You are not getting paid.

Some people don’t post because they don’t want to direct the scene. Some don’t post because they’re scared of the reviews. It’s tempting to call all non-posters quietly confident, but sometimes we’re just avoiding a feeling we don’t know what to do with.

I deleted the apps. I did not become a better correspondent.

I’m 34.95 years old now, which feels like a very specific age for my phone to keep asking me to turn on notifications. I haven’t really been on social media for about two years. None of those apps live on my phone. I still have an Instagram account with one picture on it, and every few months I log in to discover a pile of DMs that have been patiently aging without me.

One of my best friends lives in England. He has figured out that if he actually wants to reach me, he needs to use WhatsApp. Even then, he’s sending his message into a system where I’ve turned off basically every notification. The man is trying to communicate with me using the digital equivalent of leaving a letter under a rock and hoping I visit the rock.

I do feel better without the apps. I also miss things in the lives of people I care about, and that part isn’t entirely the apps’ fault. I could reach out more. I could ask how someone’s doing without waiting for a story to remind me they exist. A feed made it easy to feel vaguely caught up with people. Removing the feed means I have to do the actual catching up, which turns out to require me to participate.

That’s the less flattering side of the whole “I don’t use social media” identity. Sometimes you protect your attention. Sometimes you accidentally make yourself harder to reach and then wonder why nobody told you about the barbecue.

The nine-year Reddit breakup

Instagram wasn’t the only app I had to deal with. I had a Reddit account for nine years. I’d log in, spend too much time there, delete the app from my phone, and eventually install it again, as if the problem had been the app’s location and not the part of my brain that wanted to read one more thread.

One day I got the idea to delete the account entirely. I can be impulsive, so the voice in my head said to just do it before I had time to think about it. I listened.

Immediately after, I regretted it. Nine years of saved posts, obscure little threads, and recipes I apparently considered vital to my continued existence only after I could never find them again. It felt like ending a long, weak, toxic relationship and then remembering they still had your favorite saucepan.

But after the initial regret, I felt relieved. It was like one of those nights where you can’t tell exactly how fucked up you feel until you throw up in a 7-Eleven bathroom at 2:15 a.m. You walk out past the cashier, who knows far too much about your evening now, and suddenly feel like you found twenty dollars on the floor. Nothing glamorous happened. Something that needed to leave finally left.

I’m not saying deleting a Reddit account is therapy. I go to actual therapy every week. Lately, without the constant stream of other people’s lives and arguments on my phone, I feel like I have more room to work on the fat elephant bastards in my head that have needed attention for years.

The empty profile doesn’t prove I’m secure or especially evolved. Some of my reasons for not posting are healthy. Some are probably still worth talking about in therapy. Mostly, I like being able to have a good day without assembling evidence that it happened.

And when I want to know what’s going on with someone I love, I have to text them. My friend in England figured that part out before I did. WhatsApp, no notifications, and the patience of a medieval courier.

Watch my video: Psychology of People Who Don’t Post Their Photos on Social Media ↗