The breakfast photo is the ur-text of the narcissistic internet, a bit of content that no one else is necessarily interested in but which the poster feels the need, or even the responsibility, to make public for anyone online to see. Posting a picture of what you ate on a given morning was something we did during the early years of Twitter and Instagram, and at the time it felt novel: suddenly, you could share the most mundane moments of your life with a crowd of waiting strangers who might just be excited to see them. In a way, the breakfast photo represented the utopian dream of social media: billions of average people could throw fragments of their lives onto the internet with little mediation—their meals, their pets, their shower thoughts—and it would turn into something not only engaging but vital, a dynamic record of reality from the ground level. To post, and to interact with others’ posts, was to participate in a grand project that valorized amateurism, banality, and a sort of content-based meritocracy: anyone and anything could be interesting, and even go viral, if only you posted it the right way.
Lately, though, I’ve found myself missing the breakfast photo and its equivalents online. There don’t seem to be as many people casually sharing random moments from their lives. In fact, doing so doesn’t make much sense anymore, and it’s a little hard to believe it ever did. What do we see on social media now, more than fifteen years since its advent? A sea of influencers and creators aspiring to varying degrees of high-budget polish; headlines announcing the latest horrors of international wars; images, videos, and text generated by artificial intelligence; and unmitigated trolling and attention farming catered to users’ deep-seated fears, and more or less sanctioned by the platforms themselves. The quotidian doesn’t have as much of a place in this landscape. Thus, many people simply aren’t posting as much as they used to. Recently, I watched as a bartender friend of mine in Washington, D.C., where I live, posted a few cheerful selfies to her Instagram Stories on a weekday morning. Later, I noticed they’d disappeared—she had deleted them. “Sometimes with everything going on in the world I get worried I look insensitive posting stuff like that,” she later explained. “I get self-conscious.”
There is a generational element to this sea change: millennials who grew up on social media are moving into middle age and perhaps seeking more privacy in their lives; once you’ve settled down with a partner and children, perhaps there’s less obvious incentive to project your personality online. “I think people are more suspicious of oversharing, generally, some of which is probably a useful and healthy correction from how much we were all sharing a decade ago,” Emma Hulse, a thirtysomething lawyer acquaintance of mine, told me. But, during conversations with dozens of people about their current posting habits, many Zoomers and users even younger told me that they felt an aversion to putting their lives on social media. They, too, are suffering from posting ennui. Kanika Mehra, a twenty-four-year-old, told me, “I feel like everyone in my generation is kind of a voyeur now,” still scrolling but not posting. She continued, “People don’t want to be perceived,” and if they do post they “feel a bit of a vulnerability hangover.” Tarik Bećarević, a seventeen-year-old, said that he and his friends had never experienced the era of casual social media; now they’re stuck comparing notes on how to order their Instagram carrousels. “I honestly can’t even imagine taking a photo of my breakfast and posting that. Maybe as slide six of a photo dump,” Bećarević said. (His formula for an ideal photo-dump assemblage: “One solo pic, one group photo with friends to prove you have a social life, and then something like pretty nature or food or, preferably, a photo of some unique hobby.”) Even his friends’ private accounts, he continued, “are curated to seem free, rather than actually being free.”
