As I recently wrote, I’m not a big poster on social media. Outside of Twitter, I don’t even look at most social networks with any regularity. But Jess is a big Instagram reader (watcher / looker?), and my colleagues, who are mostly about half my age, seem to mediate their entire lives through the app. So, out of a vague sense of FOMO, or possibly a fear that I’ve become even more of an old, cantankerous Luddite than I’d realized, I recently decided to give Insta-life a whirl.

This weekend, I posted to my ‘story’ for the first time: a captioned photo of the Valentine’s Day tableau Jess left for me on our bed – a pile of cards, surrounded by a giant heart made from a dozen bags of Trader Joe’s dark chocolate peanut butter cups (a guilty pleasure I usually finish off before I’ve carried the rest of our groceries home).  

In the days since, whether cooking pasta at home, visiting the MoMA with Jess and my parents, eating dinner with them all at The Loyal, or working at the gym this morning, I’ve snapped a dozen or so further photos, with the intention – if not yet the follow-through – of similarly story-posting.  Even if, at this point, I’m still not entirely clear about what kind of stuff goes in stories versus regular posts.  

Similarly, though I’ve added a bunch of new accounts to my stream, I’m also unsure what kind of picture and video content I actually care enough about to make me reflexively pop open the app.  Especially as compared to Twitter, where I already satisfy my voyeuristic political / journalistic hobbyism while also nerding out on fitness science and relishing really terrible dad jokes.

Plus, I still feel incredibly self-conscious (and, really, self-appearance-judgy) about the idea of selfies and first-person videos and recorded workouts.  At a deeper level, I’m not even sure what kind of stuff I think I should be posting in the first place.  Is it random bullshit à la this site? Personal branding content in the fitness or fitness-tech space? A revival of my long-dormant street and landscape photographing interest?

So, in short, lots still to learn and puzzle through.  But, in the meantime, I’m going to do my best to muddle ahead.  Feel free to follow along. Even if, I suspect, it won’t be pretty.