There is a specific kind of exhaustion that does not come from working too hard. It comes from working hard for the wrong reward.
I know this because I lived it for years — and I did not realise it until I had already lost quite a lot of things I cared about.
This is not a post about hating social media. It is a post about how I lost myself inside something I genuinely loved, and what happened when I finally stopped.
I Have Always Been a Creator
Since I was a child, making things has been my love language. Lego constructions that took over the floor. Graffiti on abandoned walls. DJing at friends parties. Music. Videos. Photography. I did not do these things to be seen. I did them because the act of making something — of turning nothing into something — felt like the closest thing to magic I had ever experienced.
Then came social media. And for a while, it felt like the most natural extension of everything I had always done. I could share what I made with the people I cared about. Friends could see what I was building. It felt intimate and alive.
It did not stay that way.
When Sharing Became the Point
At some point — I cannot identify exactly when — the sequence reversed. I stopped creating things and then deciding to share them. I started living in order to share . Going somewhere and already composing the caption in my head. Filming moments instead of being in them. Spending months on a YouTube video not because I had something to say, I wanted to share a beautiful video from my travels to my community; but the algorithm rewarded consistency, not quality.
I was not living my life. I was producing content about a fraction of it.
Research on content creator psychology confirms how common this pattern is. A 2025 study applying the Stressor-Strain-Outcome framework found that content creators face mounting psychological pressures from follower count obsession, algorithm-driven production demands, and audience expectations — all of which compound into burnout and a desire to quit entirely. A survey by Billion Dollar Boy found that half of creators reported burnout directly linked to their social media careers, with nearly 40% considering leaving altogether.
I was squarely in that half before it actually happened. I just did not have the word for it yet.
The Algorithm Changed. I Did Not Notice Straight Away.
For years, social media platforms would show what I made to my friends. That felt fair. That felt like the deal. I make something; the people who know me see it. The reward was real and personal.
Then, gradually, that changed. Platforms began optimising for reach over relationship. My content was being shown to strangers — which grew my audience, which felt exciting at first. But it also meant I was no longer making things for people I knew. I was performing for an abstraction. An audience. A number.
Suddenly I felt the obligation. More content. More interesting. More polished. More frequent. Professional quality. The perfectionist in me was constantly triggered. Jealousy from fellow content creators started kicking in as I didn’t feel I could keep up with the pace to match the standard of quality I was setting for my content. Which too often, led me to identify my content to myself. That was wrong too. I wasn’t the content I was creating, but the border line was blurred at the time. The platforms were not paying me — not in money, and increasingly not in the one currency I actually valued: showing my work to people I loved.
Social media platforms are engineered to keep this cycle running. Their recommendation systems are reinforcement learning engines — literally designed to learn from your behaviour in real time and optimise for a single metric: time on platform. They do not ask what is good for you. They ask what keeps you scrolling. And if keeping you scrolling means showing your content to strangers who engage more than your friends, that is what they will do — regardless of what that does to you.
I was being exploited by the very platforms I had invested in. And I had not noticed because the exploitation was gradual, and because it dressed itself up as opportunity.
Burnout Arrived Without Warning
I burned out. Not dramatically, not all at once — but steadily, and thoroughly.
The love I had for making videos, for photography, for music — hobbies I had nurtured since childhood — became entangled with performance anxiety, with metrics, with the quiet dread of opening a platform and seeing a post had not landed. The act of creating stopped feeling like magic and started feeling like debt.
I was depressed, though I did not know it at the time. I lost things during that period. Important things. Relationships that deserved more of my presence than I was capable of giving. Opportunities I missed because I was staring at a screen waiting for validation that was never going to feel like enough.
Two Years Without Instagram
About two years ago, I stopped posting on Instagram. I have not logged into Facebook in three years. I did not make a public announcement. I did not write a long goodbye post. I just stopped, only using IG for replying to DM I’d receive.
The first few weeks were uncomfortable in a way that confirmed how dependent I had become. My motivation at the time was my empathy. I was on a journey of self-healing and that journey started with traveling the world. I was becoming overly conscious about how my past-self was feeling when I was watching other people living the life I wanted to live for myself: a digital nomad, traveling the world on a quest of self-acceptance. I didn’t want videos of me on a beautiful deserting island in the middle of the Pacific triggering any anxiety when people would watch it during their work break after a painful work meeting.
In a way, my friends and family indirectly contributed in my social media rehab. The same people I was sharing my creations with in the first place helped me to become aware that opening Instagram had been a daily source of cheap dopamine I didn’t need but was addicted to and had built this automatism whenever I’d feel awkward or bored. This quick, reliable hit of stimulation that required nothing of me except my attention. Taking that away obviously left a gap that I did not immediately know how to fill.
So I started journaling.
At first, on paper. Then on my phone's notes app because I was traveling light. And eventually in the app I would eventually build — LightSeed.
What journaling Actually Did
I do not want to overstate this as some instant transformation, because it was not. But over time, journaling changed something fundamental about how I related to my own experience.
Retrospectively, I ended up going back to adding more “screen time” after reducing it by removing social media use. But this new automatism – opening the LightSeed app on my phone instead of any other app to start being aware of the present moment at any time and anywhere – to me is now representing these precious reflective moments during my day that help me being more present and conscious ; growing into this better person I want to become and be present for the people I love.
Being aware of my emotions and my moods was the first step towards understanding what I was actually feeling — and why. Writing about it gave those feelings somewhere to go that was not a social media caption. It made my inner life feel real and worth attending to, without requiring an audience. Or shall I say: I became the audience. As I write or talk, I read and I listen to my inner-self. At the end of the day LightSeed is just a tool, I’m making the work every day by opening it.
For me, it was simpler than the research language suggests. Writing or talking about my life, helped me notice things. Talking about my daily experiences, my thoughts and how I reacted helped me to become more conscious. Discovering patterns in my mood, remembering moments I would have otherwise forgotten because it’s so easy to live our life while being unconscious we’re living it. The quiet accumulation of small good things that social media had trained me to overlook because they did not photograph well or didn’t look good enough to share (no one wants to see ants transporting a breadcrumb from my earlier sandwich; and yet it is so fascinating to watch!).
Why I Built LightSeed
As I mentioned earlier, whenever I am bored now, I open the LightSeed app and I journal about what has happened since I last opened it. Not to perform anything. Not for an audience. Just to record, reflect, and stay connected to my own life experience.
LightSeed is not an app I built because I thought it would be a good business idea. I built it because I needed it. I needed a private (and encrypted) space to track my experiences, my thoughts, my mood and emotions honestly, without the performance pressure of social media. I needed something that helped me to notice what I was feeling, not what I thought I should be feeling. As the world fell into an AI era in 2025, I saw the opportunity to use the content I was creating for myself (and not for others) to be the richer source of self reflections. By turning my memories into words instead of photographs, I’m able to transform them into a powerful medium for self-improvement using AI-powered insights that reflected my patterns back to me without a therapist or a friend judgement — the kind of self-knowledge that used to require years of therapy.
The irony is that building something again — something for myself, not for an algorithm — brought back a version of the creative joy I thought I had lost. Making LightSeed felt like making music on my computer before anyone was listening to it. Spending endless nights creating something that no one might ever see, nor experience, fighting against my own perfectionism defect to release something: my ultimate inner-battle. It felt like the creative act for its own sake, which is the only version that ever actually satisfied me.
What I Would Say to Anyone Who Recognises This
If you are a creator who has felt the joy draining out of what you used to love, you are not broken. You are not bad at your craft. You are caught in a system that was engineered to extract your energy and return as little of value as possible.
And if you think you are not a creator (I believe we all are) but you have noticed that opening your phone leaves you feeling worse rather than better — that you scroll not out of enjoyment but out of habit, out of boredom, out of the faint hope that something will make you feel something — that is the same loop, expressed differently.
You do not have to quit everything. You do not have to build an app. But you might consider, the next time you reach for your phone out of boredom, opening something that gives back rather than takes — and writing down, even briefly, what is actually going on with you today.
That small act is where it started for me. And it changed rather a lot.
LightSeed is a daily journaling, mood tracking, and emotion tracking app with private, encrypted entries and AI-powered personal insights. It exists because its creator needed it.