The Breadcrumb Trap
What if you're still following a map that no longer exists?
For more than fifteen years, the refrain about posting on social media has remained the same.
You don’t own your audience. You’re renting space on someone else’s platform.
I’ve understood that intellectually for years.
What I didn’t fully appreciate until this morning is that I’m apparently renting my own timeline, too.
I opened Instagram and noticed something strange on my grid.
My posts were no longer in chronological order, which has been the way of Instagram since I joined it in 2014.
A recent post had somehow slipped below one I’d published months earlier.
At first I thought I was imagining it.
I wasn’t.
Apparently Instagram is experimenting with treating your profile less like a historical archive and more like a layout it can rearrange.
Whether you like that change or not is almost beside the point.
The part that caught my attention wasn’t Instagram.
It was me.
My immediate reaction surprised me.
I felt less interested in posting anything at all.
That reaction sent me down a different path of inquiry.
Why?
The obvious answer would be to blame the platform.
The more interesting answer is that another assumption about how any of this works died without anyone noticing in a big internet-fanfare way.
For years, I’ve bought into the idea that when I post anything, I’m leaving breadcrumbs. A chronological trail documenting ideas, experiences, photographs, poems, and moments in time.
If you’ve been with me for a while here, you know the extent of my love-hate relationship with posting on social media. Most of the time I grind my teeth as I create and then publish content that adds to the breadcrumb trail.
Now I discover those breadcrumbs may not stay where I left them.
Someone else can rearrange the trail.
That’s when I realized the trap isn’t Instagram.
The trap is the breadcrumb itself.
For months now I’ve been asking myself a difficult question.
If I don’t see a meaningful cause-and-effect relationship between posting on Instagram (or any social platform for that matter) and people calling to work with me...
...why do I still feel compelled to keep posting?
Habit?
Hope?
Fear of disappearing?
Maybe all three.
It’s fascinating how habits can outlive the assumptions that created them.
Long after the original reason has faded, we continue behaving as though the old map still applies.
And every time we open the app, we unconsciously reach for that same map, expecting it to lead us somewhere new.
The current isn’t always out there.
Sometimes it’s inside us, pulling us to keep doing yesterday’s work for yesterday’s reasons.
Maybe that’s why this tiny change on Instagram caught my attention.
Not because my timeline moved, but because it exposed a current I hadn’t fully seen.
One that whispered:
Keep leaving breadcrumbs.
Without ever asking whether I still need to.