An easy way to a meaningful social media feed – Chetan Narang and the Unlearning Playground on Instagram

Contrary to learning much, it is mostly a matter of unlearning much that leads you to the truth.

chetan narang

In this information age, I find it to be downright unfortunate that most of the content in our social media feeds is, let’s just say, not great (read garbage). And given the amount of time we tend to spend on these platforms these days, it’s only about time we realise that something needs to be done about the same.

We scroll through our feeds, and are always greeted by similar kind of content – attention grabbing stuff that has little to no value for us if we actually really sit back and think on it. Of course there is the element of social connection to our feeds – watching through posts of our friends and family and other connections. But let’s be honest, our social media feeds are not just that. A huge portion of our daily content diet is full of content created by influencers – and most of them do not really influence us the way we ought to be influenced.

There is something important I mean when I say that. Our social media feeds are designed to keep us engaged to them, which loosely translates to – the algorithms will keep showing you content that keeps you glued to the platform.

Such content could be the content that you love – cute puppy videos for example, but not just that. Such content also includes the kind of content that you tend to find agreement with. So if you are inclined to left-wing politics and the concern areas therein, you are shown posts that are related to left-wing politics. How extreme those posts are would keep changing due to a host of factors, but the general idea stays.

Ohh but wait, there’s more!

There is another kind of content too that keeps you glued to the platform – content that triggers you, makes you write disagreeable comments, accounts for angry story shares and all the rest of it. For a person inclined to left-wing politics, that could very well mean posts about extreme right-wing politics for instance.

Please note that I am by no means saying that there is some evil corporation that is doing this to you deliberately. All I mean is that one of the main objectives to any feed algorithm would be to keep you engaged on the platform. And you provide it with signals about what engages you. And then it builds on the same. Of course, there is a lot more that goes on underneath the systems, but I hope you get the context on which I’m building this narration.

So, all said and done, when I realised that this is the case, I decided to do something about it – at least for myself and for the people who would let me be present in their social media feeds. I created this Instagram account with the idea of sharing potent philosophy, true spirituality and other stuff that’s actually meaningfully relevant to our everyday lives.

And because I have myself searched through Instagram for such accounts, I can safely claim that this is one of the best philosophy and spirituality pages out there.

There is so much to be learnt, so much to be unlearnt, so much to think about, so much to stop thinking about – and I feel that social media can play a major role in transforming how we think, both as individuals and as a society.

So, if you would let me, I would like my philosophy to be a part of your social media feed. The following is a brief snapshot of my latest posts on Instagram. Have a look, and follow along to stay connected.