I Purged My Entire Following List and All I Got Was This Lousy Sponsored Post

It started, as most genuinely terrible ideas do, with a podcast. Specifically, a podcast hosted by a man named something like Brax who described unfollowing everyone on social media as "the ultimate act of intentional living." Brax has a newsletter. Brax charges forty-two dollars a month for the newsletter. I did not subscribe to the newsletter, but I absolutely did take his advice, because apparently I have a very selective relationship with critical thinking.

I unfollowed everyone. Every last person. Friends, family, the woman from high school whose main content is her dog wearing sunglasses. Gone. All of them. For one full week, I would exist in a feed purified of human noise, allegedly discovering what the algorithm actually wanted to show me when left completely to its own devices.

Reader, it wanted to show me mattresses.

Day One: The Algorithm Blinks First

The first morning was almost peaceful. I opened Instagram expecting the usual parade of engagement announcements and gym selfies, and instead found a single promoted post for a weighted blanket company that claimed their product would "change my relationship with rest." Bold claim. I kept scrolling. There was a furniture brand. A vitamin subscription. A fintech startup with the aesthetic of a therapy office. An ad for a streaming service I already pay for, advertising itself to me, its existing customer, which felt deeply on-brand for everything happening in my life.

What I did not find: any evidence that other humans existed or that the world outside my apartment contained anything other than products waiting to be purchased.

By noon I had been served fourteen ads, two "suggested accounts" that were both for meal kit services, and one inexplicable video of a blender that had over three million views. I watched the blender video twice. I am not proud of this.

Day Three: Consumption Is Connection, Apparently

Here is something the algorithm understood about me that I did not understand about myself: I will engage with almost anything if I am bored enough. By Wednesday I had liked a post from a candle company, saved a reel from a luggage brand showing a woman running through an airport looking impossibly serene, and spent eleven minutes reading the comments section of a sponsored post for a new kind of protein bar. The comments were mostly people asking if the protein bar was keto. I do not follow a keto diet. I do not know why I was there.

But here is the genuinely unsettling part. The more I engaged with brand content — even passively, even accidentally — the more the algorithm interpreted this as a personality profile. By Thursday my feed had figured out that I was apparently a twenty-to-forty-five-year-old with an interest in "wellness adjacent" products, artisanal home goods, and the concept of travel without any actual commitment to traveling. It had built a version of me out of sponsored content, and that version was, honestly, pretty coherent. Aspirational. Slightly exhausting. Owned a diffuser.

The algorithm had replaced my social life with a consumer identity, and the consumer identity was more put-together than I am.

Day Five: The Existential Part Kicks In

I want to be very honest about what happened on day five, which is that I started to miss people. Not in a profound, philosophical way. More in a "I genuinely cannot tell if today is a normal day or if something weird is happening in the world because I have no human context" kind of way. Social media, for all its documented horrors, does function as a low-grade ambient awareness of other people's existence. When you remove that entirely and replace it with a Casper mattress and a DTC whiskey subscription, you lose something.

What you lose, specifically, is the ability to gauge whether your own life is normal. Without the comparison engine running, you are just a person, alone, watching a blender video for the third time.

I also started to notice that every single brand account I had been passively consuming spoke in the exact same voice. Warm. Lowercase. Vaguely therapeutic. "Rest is productive." "You deserve this." "Small joys matter." It is a voice that sounds like it was trained on a decade of wellness content and then fine-tuned to make you feel that buying a throw pillow is an act of self-actualization. After five days of only hearing this voice, I began to worry that I was being slowly convinced of something.

Day Seven: What the Feed Reveals When Nobody's Home

By the final day, I had a very clear picture of what social media platforms think I am when I am not actively performing myself at them. I am a consumer with disposable income and ambient anxiety. I am someone who responds to the word "cozy" and the phrase "limited batch." I am a person who can be reached through my interest in sleep, food delivery, and the aesthetic of having been somewhere interesting recently.

The algorithm had stripped away every human relationship and handed me back a receipt.

I refollowed everyone on day eight. I refollowed the high school woman with the dog in sunglasses. I refollowed people I had not spoken to in six years who post exclusively about their sourdough. I refollowed the guy who replies to every news story with a single unhinged take. I refollowed all of it, because the alternative — a feed that knows exactly what I'll click on and serves it to me without the chaos of actual human beings — turned out to be significantly more disturbing than the original mess.

Brax, if you're reading this, I would like a refund on the week of my life. I know I didn't pay for the newsletter, but I feel like you still owe me something.

The blender had four settings, by the way. I looked it up. It costs two hundred and eighty dollars. I did not buy it.

I thought about it, though. I thought about it a lot.