Area resident Denise Purnell, 34, reported experiencing a profound sense of liberation this week after discovering that the meticulously crafted three-paragraph caption she writes for every Instagram post is, in fact, read by absolutely no one. The revelation came after she accidentally posted a caption in a foreign language via translation app malfunction and received the exact same number of likes and comments as usual.
“I spent forty-five minutes writing about my emotional journey through a farmers market,” Purnell said, staring at a phone screen displaying 47 likes and one comment reading simply ‘gorg!!’ “Turns out I could have just typed the alphabet backwards and gotten the same engagement. It’s honestly freeing. I feel like I’ve been let out of a very small, very aesthetically pleasing prison.”
Social media behavioral analyst Dr. Marcus Wendell confirmed the phenomenon is widespread, noting that the average caption is skimmed for exactly 1.2 seconds before users scroll past to judge the photo’s lighting. “People think they’re writing personal essays,” Wendell said. “They’re not. They’re writing beautifully punctuated silence into the void. The void, for its part, is mainly looking at whether you look thinner than last time.”
Purnell has since begun replacing her captions with the phrase “insert feelings here,” a change that has gone entirely unnoticed by her 1,200 followers, six of whom are bots and two of whom are her mother’s separate accounts. She says she plans to spend her newfound free time — an estimated four hours per week — doing something she vaguely remembers enjoying before 2014, though she couldn’t specify what.
