Some Brief Notes on Posting on Instagram
The introduction to my recently published book "Interminable Psychic Affliction"
Before I begin, I realize I’ve not published on this website in well over half a year. Though there exist a myriad of reasons as to why, the only legitimate one is that I’ve almost completely lost the motivation to write since graduating from college this past spring. I, like countless other post-collegiate burnouts, have seen my youthful literary ambition begin to atrophy in the newfound absence of any external reinforcement; no longer occupying an environment conducive to intellectual activity has only hastened this deterioration.
Despite this, I haven’t been successful in abandoning writing altogether; on the contrary, the last couple of months have proven to be a rather fruitful time for my creative endeavors, the culmination of which has been the release of my first “book”, entitled Interminable Psychic Affliction: Collected Stories 2022-2025. My hesitance to explicitly refer to this as a book stems from the fact that I did not so much write its contents - three years’ worth of Instagram Stories - as merely compile them in a legible format. Curation is an art unto itself, but it is not something that often enters the domain of the written word. Regardless, I’ve felt it appropriate to at least share the introduction to this, in the vain hope that it might prompt an interested soul to take the plunge and purchase a copy. Enjoy.
From Interminable Psychic Affliction: Collected Stories 2022-2025
Introduction
What is it about the act of “posting” - the insatiable desire to share the minutiae of one’s life with strangers on the internet - that has proven so compelling to me? This question is one that I’ve struggled to answer ever since I began posting frequently on Instagram Stories over three years ago. Like many others my age, I have always found the distinction between the “physical” and the “digital” to be fairly arbitrary, especially given how deeply imbricated online activity has become in the constitution of one’s subjectivity; conceiving of one’s life without the influence of online phenomena feels wholly alien to anyone who was born after the widespread adoption of the internet.
In writing this book, I have sought to fulfill two distinct yet interrelated objectives. The first of these is as a form of posterity, a physical means by which to preserve everything worthwhile I’ve either said or attempted to say online. The second is an effort to discern the effect of allowing the complex dynamics of digital communication and subjectivation to dictate the contours of my life; put simply, it is an attempt to answer the question as to why I post.
The three years of posts collected here - a period roughly corresponding to my time as a college undergraduate - comprise the most comprehensive account of my experience navigating the immense upheavals - social, emotional and psychological - associated with the transition to adulthood. They also stand as a reflection of my pathological compulsion to render the most intimate aspects of my life a spectacle for public consumption; what is a post other than a crude form of exhibitionism, done for little more than the momentary gratification of one’s ego? In the process of compiling them, I have forced myself to confront the lingering embarrassment of having derived considerable personal fulfillment and emotional catharsis from providing strangers an unprecedented degree of access to my interior world. In retrospect, it is difficult for me to say if I’ve ever posted for myself; so much of what I’ve shared online, from the most irreverent observations to the most exaggerated accounts of emotional distress, was done with the implicit knowledge that they might, if even for a moment, force someone to acknowledge the spectral tendrils of my presence in their life.
This desire, though trite as it sounds, may be sufficient to understand my own inclination towards posting. We humans have, since time immemorial, sought ways to indelibly lodge ourselves within the minds of others, oftentimes for no greater reason than as an affirmation of our existence. Posting, when considered as a process resembling what the Italian artist Guglielmo Achille Cavellini referred to as “self-historicization”, appears as the apotheosis of such a phenomenon, insofar as it transforms our desperate attempts at self-promotion into an engine for the construction of our own personal histories. That it functions as a conduit for the expression of our most narcissistic and self-indulgent tendencies does not invalidate its centrality to the chronicling of our lives in an age where the boundary between the “physical” and “digital” has long ceased to exist; I hope that, through reading, such a realization will gradually make itself apparent.
December 26th, 2025
Interminable Psychic Affliction: Collected Stories 2022 - 2025 can be purchased via Metalabel at the link here.