The End of the Beautiful Instagram: Why the Feed Feels Like Noise Now

Instagram Used to Be My Escape. Now It Feels Like Noise.

It’s late. The day has done what days do: demanded too much, moved too fast, and left me with that familiar mixture of fatigue and restlessness. The house is quieter. The life outside is quieter too.

And I do what millions of us do, almost without thinking.

I open Instagram.

Not because I need anything. Not because I’m trying to learn something. I open it the way you open a magazine. The way you used to flick through pages on a sofa after dinner. A small escape. A clean, beautiful pause before sleep.

Or at least… that’s what Instagram used to be for me.

Because lately, the moment the feed loads, something feels off. The rhythm is wrong. The atmosphere has changed. Where I used to get clean photography, taste, travel, design, style — little windows into a curated, almost cinematic reality — I now get noise.

Video after video. Talking heads. Low-effort content. Trends I don’t recognise. The feeling of being pushed into an algorithm’s idea of what I should want, rather than choosing what I came here to see.

And somewhere in the middle of all that, there’s a new character entering the room: AI.

Not the useful kind. Not the “help me organise my life” kind. The other kind — the content that looks like something but feels like nothing. Pretty, yes. Sometimes impressive. But empty. Aesthetic without soul. A polished surface with no human fingerprints underneath.

People call it “AI slop.” It’s a harsh phrase, but it captures the sensation perfectly: content that exists because it can, not because it should.

And it makes me realise something slightly uncomfortable:

Instagram used to be a place to dream.
Now it’s becoming a place you have to defend yourself.

The beautiful grid wasn’t fake. It was the point.

credit:@joyfulcaptures

There’s a narrative that gets thrown around whenever someone misses the old Instagram: “You just want the fake, polished world back.”

But for many of us, it wasn’t about fake. It was about taste.

The old Instagram — the grid era, the photography era — was a visual language. A kind of quiet agreement between creators and viewers:

We’re going to make something beautiful.
You’re going to enjoy it.
And for a few minutes, your brain can rest.

It was escapism, yes — but not the cheap kind. More like design escapism. Lifestyle escapism. The kind that feels like walking past a beautifully lit restaurant window, knowing you’re not eating there tonight, but enjoying the glow anyway.

After a long day, I didn’t want more reality. I already had reality. I wanted a better angle of it. A more elegant version. A little moment of fantasy that didn’t demand anything from me.

There’s a reason people fell in love with beautifully curated feeds: they felt like micro-magazines. They were moodboards. They were inspiration. Sometimes they were pure visual pleasure, and that’s not a crime.

Not everything has to be raw to be real.

Sometimes “polished” is simply another word for “crafted.”

TikTok energy is not my resting energy

Here’s where I’ll be honest, and I know this will sound slightly snobbish, but it’s how I feel:

I’ve always found TikTok a bit… tacky sometimes.

Not always. There’s brilliant content there. But the overall energy is loud. Fast. Hyper. Always performing. Always trying to hook you in the first second, because if it doesn’t, you’re gone.

TikTok feels like a crowded street market: exciting, chaotic, full of shouting, full of bargains and nonsense mixed together.

Instagram, for years, felt like a gallery. Or at least a glossy magazine on a coffee table. A curated space where taste mattered.

And now Instagram is trying to compete in the street market.

And I understand why. I’m not naïve. Platforms follow attention, and attention follows video, and video follows whatever keeps people watching. If you’re running Instagram, you’re not thinking about my evening scroll — you’re thinking about minutes watched, growth curves, retention graphs.

I get it.

But as a user — as someone who used Instagram as a little escape — it feels like losing something that genuinely mattered.

Because after a long day, the last thing I want is a stranger’s face talking at me from their kitchen, telling me what I should buy or think or do. I don’t want to be grabbed.

I want to drift.

I want to see beautiful objects, beautiful interiors, beautiful corners of the world, well-shot moments that feel like a small holiday for the brain.

I don’t want “authentic” if authentic means “everything is messy and loud and filmed badly and you have to pretend that’s somehow superior.”

The new pressure: you have to judge what’s real

There’s another shift happening at the same time, and it changes the whole mood of the platform.

AI makes it easy to create things that look incredible without being true.

A perfect living room that doesn’t exist. A perfect man that isn’t real. A perfect holiday that never happened. A perfect body, perfect lighting, perfect street, perfect everything — generated, filtered, manipulated, assembled.

And here’s what that does to the viewer:

It makes you suspicious.

Instagram used to be aspirational in a way that felt playful. You knew people curated their lives. You knew angles and lighting were doing work. But there was still a sense that what you were seeing came from someone’s actual world.

Now, the question isn’t just “is this edited?”

It’s “is this even real?”

And that’s a heavier feeling. A more exhausting feeling. It turns scrolling into labour. You’re no longer relaxing — you’re evaluating. Detecting. Deciding whether you trust what you see.

And once that suspicion enters the room, the whole experience changes.

It’s like walking into a gallery and realising half the paintings might be printed posters. You can still enjoy the colours… but something is gone.

credit:@ngarsipcahaya

Authenticity is important… but it’s not the only value

The word “authenticity” gets thrown around like a moral superior.

Authentic. Real. Raw. Unfiltered.

And yes — authenticity matters.

But the problem is: authenticity is not automatically good content.

A video of someone ranting in their kitchen might be authentic, but it can still be boring. Or unpleasant. Or simply not what you want at 10pm after a long day.

And polished content isn’t automatically fake. It can be honest too. It can be personal. It can be meaningful.

You can be authentic with good lighting.

You can be real with a sense of style.

You can show your life without showing every unmade bed and every chaotic corner of your home.

There’s a difference between “authentic” and “unconsidered.”

And sometimes, what we’re being asked to accept as “authentic” is simply a lowering of standards dressed up as a virtue.

What I miss is not perfection. It’s taste.

If I had to summarise my disappointment in one word, it wouldn’t be “polished.”

It would be taste.

Taste is the thing that makes Instagram feel like a magazine rather than a street argument. Taste is composition. Pacing. Colour. A point of view. A sense that someone cared about what they posted.

Taste doesn’t have to be expensive. It doesn’t have to be luxury. It can be a well-shot coffee on a simple table. It can be a clean outfit photo. It can be a street scene with the right light. It can be a calm product shot. It can be a good caption that feels written, not spat out.

Taste is what makes content feel like a gift rather than a demand.

And when taste disappears, the platform becomes tiring.

The irony: we wanted escape, and now we’re being dragged back into reality

Instagram used to be a soft place.

It was where you went to see:

• cities you wanted to visit

• homes you wanted to live in

• outfits you wanted to wear

• objects you wanted to own

• moments that looked better than your day

And that was fine. That was the deal. We weren’t stupid. We knew it was curated.

But it gave us the psychological benefit of a little dream.

Now, Instagram feels like it’s leaning into “real life” — except it’s not real life in the human, meaningful sense. It’s real life in the messy, chaotic, content-farm sense.

And that’s not escape.

That’s just more noise.

So what’s next?

Here’s what I think happens now — and why I’m not entirely hopeless.

1) The feed becomes entertainment-first

It will keep moving toward video, toward speed, toward whatever holds attention. That’s the direction.

If you want the old Instagram, waiting for the platform to “return” won’t work. It won’t.

2) The beautiful Instagram doesn’t die — it becomes niche

It doesn’t disappear. It just becomes more intentional.

The people who still care about aesthetics will follow certain accounts the way you follow a magazine. They’ll save posts. They’ll collect inspiration. They’ll seek calm corners on purpose.

In other words: beauty becomes curated again — but this time by the viewer, not the platform.

3) The real winners will be people who feel human and look good

There is a third lane emerging:

Authentic, but art-directed.

Real voice. Real life. Real opinion.
But shot with taste. Edited with restraint. Posted with intention.

Not fake. Not chaotic.
Human — but elevated.

That’s the middle ground people will crave once they get tired of AI sludge and endless kitchen monologues.

And they will get tired. Because slop is cheap. It’s everywhere. It’s easy. And easy becomes boring.

Credit: @iwn

My own conclusion (and my small rebellion)

I don’t think we want AI slop. Not long-term.

A little novelty, sure. A few impressive images, yes. But as a diet? No. It becomes flavourless. It becomes wallpaper.

And I don’t think most of us truly want the messy, hyper-performative version of “authentic” either — not as our main evening escape.

What I think we want is something older and simpler:

We want to feel something.

We want beauty.
We want taste.
We want calm.
We want humans behind the content.
We want craft that doesn’t scream for attention.

And maybe the real answer is this:

Instagram won’t give us that by default anymore.

So we’ll have to build it ourselves.

By curating who we follow. By saving what inspires us. By being more intentional with our own content. By refusing to copy the loudest style just because the algorithm is pushing it this week.

And maybe, quietly, that’s the next era:

Not the era of the perfect grid.
Not the era of chaotic authenticity.
But the era of creators who feel real — and still care about making something beautiful.

Because at the end of the day, after a long day, I don’t want another neighbour’s kitchen.

I want a small escape.

And I still believe there’s a place for that — even if we have to fight a little harder to find it.

Jerome