Do you know how many reels you watch in a day? Let’s say your screen time on Instagram is about 2.5 hours. If the average reel runs for a minute, that’s about 150 reels a day.

I had to do the math because I was sick of myself, sick of scrolling incessantly, of filling every gap in my day with reels. Each time I surfaced from a scroll session, it felt like coming up for air. Two hours had passed by and I had no recollection of it!

Okay, next question: Can you remember the last reel you watched?

I’d bet good money you can’t. I couldn’t either, when I came across a line in Gurwinder’s blog: “Try to recall what you saw on social media the last time you scrolled. You’ll notice you can barely remember any posts, even if you scrolled for hours. This phenomenon has been confirmed by studies, which have found that social media impairs both short-term and long-term memory.” He likens it to drinking from the river Lethe, where lost souls sought oblivion and found absolution.

That is what happens when you try to recall your last scroll session. The specifics dissolve almost instantly, leaving only a vague residue, the illusion of having been informed or entertained*.*

So over the past few weeks, I decided to run a small 1 experiment with Instagram Reels. Instead of just scrolling mindlessly, I tried to record almost everything I was being shown. This wasn’t a data collection experiment as much as it was a archiving and documentation. Although, once I saw the data, I couldn’t resist making a few pie charts and drawing conclusions.

1. Emotional/Social: These were the reels everyone seems to get. Trending sound, silly skits, pets doing improbable things. Followed by endless hot takes about relationships, showcases of modern love, comedy sketches and glimpses into people’s family or lifestyle. They’re easy to consume, easy to mimic, and and the algorithm’s favourite child.

2. Informational: These reels tried to teach me something in a very short amount of time. Fun facts, trivia, recipes, life hacks, and little oddities. Sometimes useful, sometimes just "why there are small holes in airplane windows." I didn't mind them. Facts are always important because it's always nice to dispense them on dates and gatherings.

3. Aspirational: My absolute favourite category. These reels made me want to do things. I stumbled across people working on genuinely interesting projects including but not limited to art builds, quirky inventions and small experiments. Others were reading poetry, making short animations, or sharing fleeting pieces of writing.

What you get and what you notice depends on how YOU choose to engage. It is not the algorithm actually, it is in fact YOU!

I didn’t set out to prove anything with this experiment, but even this casual categorisation revealed things. Some were obvious, others unsettling.

1. Reels quietly started giving new barometers for how to measure love and friendship. The kind of staged, slow-motion love stories backed by music that people post began to feel like the standard my own relationships should live up to. Unknowingly, you also start testing these relationships. You start to look out for those 5 red flags, you ask them to start peeling oranges in an attempt to prove their love for you! There is a certain ache for witnessed love, and unknowingly, your inner dialogue starts to look like the comment section of a reel, wanting love like that to come find you and attack you!

2. I became instantly aware of how many different topics I was exposed to in just a short span of scrolling. More importantly, I noticed how quickly I began accepting them without question. If a reel told me I HAD to try out a restaurant, I’d add it to my to-do list. If a creator insisted I needed a certain candle for “self care,” I’d start shopping for candles.

3. (darling hold my haaand) nothing beats a jet2 holiday and right now you can save £50 per person. that's £200 off for a family of 4! Catchphrases, tones, and even ways of expressing myself started sneaking in. Without realising it, reels were rewiring not just what I thought about, but how I spoke and carried myself. We are borrowing so much of our interiority from the reels, knowingly and unknowingly!

4. I was being sold to constantly, or they were building trust with me to sell something to me eventually! Someone woke up and was selling me a serum, a lifestyle, or a worldview.

5. I caught myself constantly wanting to know where everything was from! Where are those earrings from? Which raincoat is that? Where's that café? The feed turned into an endless catalog, with me playing scavenger.

6. What struck me most was how compressed it all was! A creator might have read three books, watched a movie, and connected the dots, but I only got the 15 second distilled version. It gave me the rush of "learning something new" without any of the work.

7. Obviously, I was measuring myself against everyone, everywhere! The PhD student at Oxford, the person at a fashion show, the dude who ran 100 miles, the perfect body, the perfect thrifted dress, the shark diver in Japan. Having access to all these lives made mine feel smaller and smaller.

8. I hate the time lapse reels and the way they messed with my sense of effort and reward. Watching someone condense three months of hard work into thirty seconds tricked me into believing I too should be able to achieve things instantly. It chipped away at my ability to value slow, sustained effort.

9. Scrolling outsourced my thoughts. I noticed fewer moments where I was just sitting with myself. The voice in my head had been replaced by borrowed scripts.

10. "Comment below which outfit I should wear," "help me pick my next vacation," "where should I go next." People were handing over choices to strangers, and I realized how many of these I was participating in. They aren't really decisions worth my energy, yet I was giving them attention.

11. I started noticing how much I was influenced by what my friends liked or commented on. There's now a tab for it, after all. Hitting "like" on the same reel as a friend gave me a fleeting sense of closeness, though it lasted all of a microsecond.

12. I realized how often I was using reels as a stand in for real communication. I started expecting people to absorb unspoken expectations through content I forwarded, rather than saying what I wanted out loud.

Above all, you forget that it is all a performance or some form of it! Nothing is raw or unmediated.

So will I continue to watch reels?

The answer is yes actually, despite how insidious it has become. The internet is largely shaped by the way reels are designed, and being completely cut off is a privilege that not everyone can afford. But our consumption needs to be evaluated constantly and always.

By cataloging and then reflecting on my consumption, this is my way of going against the algorithm that is designed to keep me scrolling constantly. The tragedy isn't that there's no valuable content on these platforms. It's that the delivery mechanism is specifically engineered to prevent the kind of sustained attention that would allow that value to actually take root in your life. These platforms' entire architecture works against this kind of deep processing. Reels aren't going anywhere. But neither is my attention. And the next time I give it away, I'd like it to feel like a choice, not a reflex.