We’re all familiar with that feeling: You’ve carefully crafted a post, poured your heart into it, and can’t wait to share it with the world. You add the finishing touches, the perfect hashtags, and with a smile, you hit ‘share.’ A small blue bar inches out below your post as it uploads, excitement bubbles within you… It’s live!
You’re the first to watch, like, and save, and then you wait. To quell the anxiety, you close the app, planning to return in an hour to the anticipated outpouring of love. You get back online, a red dot beams at you guiding you to notifications. Only to find three likes, and one of them is yours.
You’re not alone. Many of us find ourselves at the mercy of an algorithm that seems to favor app retention over creativity. We may understand this by now, but it doesn’t ease the sting. We still yearn for our posts to shatter the glass ceiling, to be so exceptional that even an algorithm designed to rigidly adhere to a set of rules might somehow deviate, recognize and share our brilliance with the world. Whether we like to admit it or not, our self-worth and confidence hang in the balance during that fleeting moment when we sadly note our meager share of likes. I have 1400 followers, one of my post has only 2 views—yes, views, not even likes. Just three posts down my feed, a stranger I don’t follow shares an 6-second loop with a trending sound, and it thrives in the thousands. No matter how many times we are told to not take it personally, we invariably place our self-worth at the mercy of the algorithm. If 1 million likes can be done, why can it not be done by us?
My liberation from this vicious cycle came by accident, though it must have happened at least a hundred times before I caught the pattern. It was in the realization that every time I revisited my old posts, the ones crafted with genuine love, they never failed to leave me with a sense of contentment and deep fulfillment. I could recall the stories behind them, the emotions I poured into their creation, and there was something profoundly fulfilling about it. The posts with less meaning, designed solely to go viral, didn’t provide the same lasting joy, although they were fun to look at.
What surprised me was that, upon reflection, it wasn’t the likes and engagement I had desperately craved at the moment of posting that mattered days and weeks later. Actually, once the post had lived almost a month online I was detached to the likes and more taken by the beauty and memory of the art itself. The number of likes now seemed almost inconsequential, akin to mere metadata attached to the content.
If you cannot find any posts of yours that make you feel this way, then there’s a chance you haven’t yet created something for you.
Now that I understand my posts ultimately possess the power to enrich and inspire me, I approach my creations with the intention of what will make me proudest.
Creativity, to me, is an act of worship. It’s honoring the divine gift we’ve been given, and any time we use it as intended, we pay homage to the God who designed us for it. Our talent, opportunities and abilities are all gifts from God. Imagine telling God that you won’t share that gift anymore because a robot algorithm suggested it wasn’t valuable. Yeah, try telling God that. The world of likes and engagement often makes us feel like door-to-door salespeople, standing on the street holding our art over our heads, trying to convince others that we’ve made art. But in reality, we create art because it’s an intrinsic part of who we are—it’s that simple and no one should have the power to take that from us. I hope that we can return to creating art for ourselves.
Candidly, as I write this in this moment, a small part of me hopes that this article would reach and resonate with millions. But the deeper truth is that, three months from now, if I find myself battling a sense of self-worth with my art, I’ll return to these words, and they will revive and inspire me.
Perhaps, in the end, that’s all this was ever meant to do.