Instagram,Lust and Loneliness
Visualise this, you are in your late teens, preparing for a competitive exam, locked in your room, taking online classes. Most of your friends are off to Kota for the same exam, and now you are all alone. You don’t have anyone to talk to, so you start exploring social media platforms like Quora, Twitter, etc. You love maths and cricket, so you join such communities there.
One fine Sunday evening, you’re scrolling Twitter because that’s what you do when you’re not studying, eating, or attending classes. You see a cricket edit of your favourite cricketer. You open the post, check the comments, and someone says Instagram editors are on another level. So you do what any gullible teenager would do,you install that app. At first, it’s perfect. Your feed is full of cricket edits, and they just keep getting better. You start spending most of your free time there, just watching and enjoying.
But then, one day, you like a reel of a girl singing. That’s it. The algorithm has you now. It keeps pushing more of the same beautiful girls, music, aesthetics. You keep liking them. You keep scrolling. Slowly, you forget why you even installed Instagram. And the worst part? You don’t even care.Why?beacuse you are liking the content the very content that's going to be the reason of destruction of the thing you based your entire life around i.e. academics.
What was supposed to be entertainment becomes a habit. Then it becomes a priority. Your studies quietly move to second place,something they should never be. Months pass like this. Your screen time goes up to 4–5 hours a day, just on Instagram. You see it, but you ignore it. Then the result comes,you fail your exams. And you still don’t care. Because you can just come back and scroll again.
So why do you love Instagram so much? The easy answer is—you’re a teenage guy, you like looking at beautiful girls. Fair. But that’s not the real reason. The real reason is you’re alone. You don’t have anyone to share your thoughts with. No one to talk about your day, your struggles, random opinions. And when you spend most of your time staring at a screen, that silence starts getting loud.
So you look for something to fill it. You join communities. You scroll endlessly. You start watching things that distract you from what’s actually bothering you. And yeah, you look at girls and get lost in that too. Not just because of attraction but because it helps you escape. For a few seconds, you’re not thinking about your exams, your loneliness, or the pressure. You’re just distracted.
But here’s what you don’t understand at that point: avoiding your problems doesn’t solve them. It just makes sure they’re still there,waiting for you, only worse. And while you think you’re coping, you’re actually digging a deeper hole. Months turn into a year. Maybe more. Then one day, it hits you. You weren’t unlucky. You weren’t trapped. You were sabotaging yourself.
And it doesn’t just affect your studies. It starts affecting how you think. You begin to see the opposite gender more as objects than people. You feel weird about your own thoughts. You avoid eye contact. You start isolating yourself even more. Now you’re not just lonely,you’ve made yourself harder to connect with. And that’s the real damage.
Using social media to talk to people or make friends isn’t wrong. But using it to feed your lust and treating it like a solution to your loneliness? That’s where everything goes wrong.