They Are Training You for Impatience and Impermanence

This photograph was bound to “fail” online.

I titled it ‘The Gathering’.

A group of birch trees stood out from thick undergrowth, their pale trunks behind a web of thin, crossing branches. The whole scene was dark and layered, inviting a closer look. I took the photo during an early morning walk while praying my rosary.

To be appreciated, it needs a wall, or at least a large screen, and it needs time.

I knew this when I uploaded it to Instagram, but I did it anyway. It had been too long since I posted anything recent, and I felt I needed to feed the beast.

A friend texted me later. He said it looked like one of those Highlights magazine puzzles where you search for hidden objects in a busy image. He called the next day to explain, but he didn’t have to. I already understood and wasn’t offended. On his phone, the photo I posted couldn’t stand out.

That morning, he looked at it on his large monitor, and the details finally came through. He told me it needed to be seen big to really work. He was right.

Without realizing it, my friend had summed up the whole problem.

Social media is designed for speed and distraction. It keeps us moving and makes it hard to spend enough time with anything to really enjoy it.

There’s always another photo, another video, another opinion, another outrage, another fifteen seconds. A post lasts only a few hours before it’s buried by the next one. The system doesn’t reward what endures. It rewards whatever comes next.

Spend enough years inside this current, and you begin to expect that nothing endures. Instead, you want the next hit and measure things by speed or likes.

Impatience and impermanence, taught for free.

Somewhere along the way, the question shifts. Instead of asking if something is worth making, you start asking what you should post just to stay relevant.

Those aren’t the same question. One is about the work itself. The other is about feeding a system that’s never satisfied.

I’ve struggled with all of this for as long as social media has been around.

When Facebook first came out, I joined to connect with friends, family, and clients, but I left a year later. I’ve always called social media “the connected-disconnection,” a place where you feel connected but are really still a stranger.

I was reluctant about Instagram at first and only joined in 2013 because a photographer friend encouraged me. I left three years later, but came back in 2022 after friends and clients said a photographer like me needs to be there.

The first thing I posted after returning was this image called ‘Guiding Wake’.

I photographed it in the fog on Lake Carlos while working for a client one early morning (read the story of this photo here). The caption I wrote for the post was a short poem that now feels almost like a warning to myself:

Lost in the social media sea
Only my wake to guide me
Tread softly… carefully
Do not add to the noise
You’ll scare the fish

Even back then, I understood.

I had walked back through the door, already uneasy about the space I reentered.

This space runs on hunger.

The algorithm reminds me of the plant in Little Shop of Horrors. It keeps growing, always demanding to be fed, but it’s never satisfied.

Give it a post, and it wants another. This beast always demands another offering.

If you go quiet, you’re quickly forgotten.

My work runs the other way. A print is an object made to last. Someone hangs it up and lives with it for years; it doesn’t scroll away or disappear. The birch photo rewards anyone who takes the time to look. You need to pause before the branches and details reveal themselves.

There is no thumbnail version of that.

I know what the feed wants from me. It wants videos and behind-the-scenes clips. People like seeing the process, and I get that. But I’ve never figured out how to do both at once without weakening both. When I’m out taking photos, it takes all my focus, and stopping to record a video pulls me out of that creative moment. I can’t give my full attention to both the photo and the recording.

So I choose the photograph, and write about it afterward. This essay is that choice.

I have to admit, I keep going back because I want to be seen.

I post, then I check the numbers, feeling a small boost when they go up and a small sting when they don’t. I’m shouting into the void with everyone else, hoping for a response.

There is a quote commonly attributed to St. John Chrysostom that I cannot shake:

“If you knew how quickly people would forget you after your death, you would not seek in your life to please anyone but God.”

It might sound grim, but it’s not. There’s actually freedom in it. If I’m going to be forgotten quickly, and I will be, then the approval I chase is worth less than it feels late at night when I’m holding my phone.

Scripture says, “the double-minded man is unstable in all his ways,” and I see that instability every time I open the app and feel the urge to post. I want both God and the crowd at the same time.

Being forgotten by the crowd reminds me of the One who never forgets.

So for now, I’ve deleted these apps from my phone and stopped checking the numbers. Fifty thousand followers sounds better than five hundred, and a hundred thousand sounds better still, but those numbers say almost nothing about what really matters: real connection. I’d rather have five hundred people who understand me and my work than fifty thousand who just scroll past.

An essay can show up in someone’s inbox and be read slowly over coffee or tea, set aside, picked up again, and responded to. Then a conversation can start. That’s the kind of connection I want, and it was never going to come from chasing numbers.

None of this is new; we’ve just forgotten. Before we were expected to act like small media companies, artists simply made things. Writers wrote, painters painted, photographers took photos. Our work didn’t need to be refreshed every morning to stay alive or relevant. A book written fifty years ago can still change someone’s life. A photo taken a hundred years ago can still stop us in our tracks.

Good work has always stood the test of time, which is the one thing the feed can’t handle.

The cost is not hidden. To feed the algorithmic beast, I would have to become someone I am not: quicker, louder, willing to make the disposable thing that stops a thumb.

I will not do that.

So my audience grows slowly, or not at all, and the algorithm never learns what to do with me.

I still want to unplug completely, but I haven’t found a clear way to do it yet. Even this essay lives on a platform that needs constant feeding, and it slows down if I’m quiet for too long.

I still haven’t found space on the internet that rewards slowness. Maybe it doesn’t exist.

So I’ll keep making things that aren’t meant for the scroll, and put them where they can be enjoyed slowly, and try to hold on to two truths at once.

Faithfulness and reach aren’t the same. I only have to answer for being faithful.

The birch trees are still out there in the undergrowth, doing what they were created to do, waiting for anyone willing to slow down long enough to notice and appreciate them.

Thank you for reading.

If this brought something to mind, reply. I’d genuinely like to hear your thoughts.

The Gathering is available as a signed and numbered limited-edition print