Liking Every Photo on Instagram Is Loving-Kindness
I'm writing thirty posts in thirty days, again. This is number thirteen.
Instagram is weird as fuck. It’s an exquisite mosaic of human snippets, assembled for you daily, free of charge. Just for you. All the cupcakes, butts, skylines, and tourist attractions you could ever hope for. Imagine what an impoverished Flemish peasant would think of such a bounty.
And what do you do with this gift? You judge it. Cruel as you are, you mete out your approval for this or that lunch. Is this vacation photo good enough for you? A good use of your half-second? Hm, you muse, in your shallow and pedantic way—perhaps your college acquaintances haven’t gotten married tastefully enough. You’re going to keep your likes for someone else, even though you have an infinite supply.
This used to be my approach. Now I do something else. I don’t go on Instagram much, but, when I do, I just scroll through and hit like on every photo on my feed.
This makes me feel loving-kindness for the whole universe. I just start to love everyone and everything. Bad picture of your dog? I love you, and your dog. Dumb selfie from someone I barely know anymore? Thank you, so much, for your attempt to transmit your beauty to the universe.
Doing this requires a certain feigned obliviousness to social signals. Occasionally, I hit like on a photo of someone who doesn’t like me, or something with a caption I actively disagree with. There’s a person who attempted to actively undermine my literary career who, for some reason, I’m still following on Instagram. And I have to choose not to care about double-tapping her posts. This is good training in the art of not caring about things that don’t matter. It’s also good training in remembering that my haters are human beings.
With Instagram, you have been given a weapon that you can raise against the world’s unhappiness. You can be a minor deity, showering love and attention on every facet of the manifold eternal. Or you could keep deciding that your co-worker’s spaghetti dinner doesn’t impress you. Up to you. Your thumb awaits instruction.
I think this only works if people don't know you're doing it. If I know that someone likes literally every post they see, then them liking my post is no longer an indication that they "liked my post" (in whatever sense we usually use).
It just means they happened to see my post, which isn't as much of a big deal. I could imagine being disappointed by thinking "Someone liked my post? Oh, it's just X, they like every post." (which is a feeling I've had before with bots and the like.)
I guess that's fine if likes are anonymous, or if your concern is cultivating a loving-kindness feeling within yourself and not with whatever other people feel about your likes.
Delightfully put!