Confession time: I hate reels. I genuinely find them exhausting, and if you send me reels, I will likely never open them unless I have a really good reason to do it.
Maybe this is a hot take, but reels have gotten overwhelming to me. I open Facebook and have a list of six reels the algorithm hopes will catch my attention. Instagram is basically TikTok-lite with a shift far away from its original picture-heavy interface. Now everything is reels, little short videos about any and everything, and if you’re on any social media platform, you’re assaulted by them.
It doesn’t stop there, either.
When I hunt down a new recipe, a video instantly pops up with a 30-second clip of someone’s hand dropping pasta in boiling water on a hotplate that I know only gets used because it looks better on camera than someone’s sauce-splattered stovetop. Half the blogs out there have videos of their content in case we needed it in that format, and most websites now have video instructions rather than text, many with AI-generated voices to add that uncanny valley twist.
It’s exhausting, y’all.
There’s something to be said for not being jump-scared by an auto-playing reel of some man telling me how to deal with a narcissist or a bear entering an unlocked house and ransacking it. I’m not interested in watching “Get Ready With Me” videos where some stranger tells me about her opinions while she applies makeup. From the audio blaring in the background to the cutesy subtitles and captions popping up, they really are intended to grab your attention and not let go until you’ve watched sixteen videos about baby elephants playing in a stream or a dozen BookTube reels about books you must add to your TBR right this very instant.
It seems like everyone and their dog is a content creator these days. But I feel like half the content is so short as to be absent of any real value. So many people are oversharing about every detail of their daily lives without bringing anything of real interest to the viewer. I can just as easily chat with my friends if I want to find out how other people live, and then at least I’m engaging meaningfully in something.
Social media pushes reels as these instant dopamine hits that suck you in until you’ve wasted an hour of your life watching twelve or fifteen variations on the same theme. And if that wasn’t bad enough, we’re already surrounded by such short content in so many formats that our poor brains are just addicted to the reels and unable to engage in longer content without a lot of focus that many of us struggle with.
As someone who already struggled with visual formats for learning and taking in information, reels truly exhaust me. I see these short videos where people want to review books, talk about Dollar Tree dupes for beauty products, explain complex behavioral disorders in bite-sized fashion, and I just realize this format simply is not for me.
Maybe I’m showing my age by wanting my content in long-form with pictures and text I can scroll through peacefully. If that means I’m scrolling past someone’s story of their neighbor’s heirloom tomatoes to find a new take on bruschetta instead of squinting at someone’s nearly unreadable font that flicks past in a 90-second video with ingredients being finger-snapped into a bowl, I’ll take it. I’ll just keep my phone silenced and fingers ready to quickly scroll past a wall of reels so I can enjoy the content that works for me.
