At the height of their popularity, my Maine Coons had 15.8k followers, and I posted every day. Many of my pictures went "viral," garnering tens of thousands of likes and hundreds of comments. They were featured on other, larger channels with some frequency. I even got some free cat toys and cat food. I had some modest hopes of earning some actual money and becoming a stay-at-home cat mom/blogger.

But I haven't posted a single picture since February 9th, 2021, and haven't posted regularly since the summer of 2020.

To people who want to become Instagram famous (or enjoy their cats too, at any rate), my decision may seem senseless. But why stop when I had such a large follower count? And given how quick and easy it is to post a snap of a cute cat per day, what was the harm in continuing?

Our culture prizes attention above all else. It's what drives people to try to go viral on Twitter, even though it brings vitriol and perhaps $10–20. It's what causes us to do weird social experiment videos and upload them to YouTube. It's what caused me to keep up with my cats' Instagram account for nearly two years. And it's why it's so shocking for people to hear that I don't post anymore on that account.

Here's why I abandoned my kind of Instagram-famous account.

1. You can never be satisfied.

When I first started, I thought once I got to 1,000 followers, I'd have made it in my own eyes. I reached that milestone and quickly set my sights on five thousand followers — then I could rest. When I got to five thousand, I needed ten thousand. Ten thousand became fifteen thousand.

1. You can never be satisfied.

You can see it's never enough. I'm sure even those with millions of followers jealously monitor their counts and always are hoping to see them increase.

There's no natural nuance on Instagram, no concept of fan quality. Bigger is always better, and you can always have more followers. I got sick of the rat race.

2. It was a lot of upkeep and not a lot of rewards.

To the casual Instagram scroller, a single picture a day may not sound like much to keep up with.

But I challenge you to take a single picture — and post it! — every single day and see how quickly you become weary.

And it's not just that. Because you're being judged by however many people you post it to, plus the all-knowing Instagram algorithm, it's never as simple as snapping a pic and uploading it. You have to ideate the shot, take several pictures, edit them, crop them, upload them, come up with a clever caption, and remember to do it at the same time every day.

The sheer repetition of the task was numbing.

It'd be worth it if I were getting paid, or at least getting something. At first, I thought the thrill of getting thousands of likes was enough for me. And it was at the start, but quickly it lost its appeal.

As I mentioned above, I got some free stuff for my cats — cat beds, cat treats, cat toys, and even cat collars. But I never earned a penny.

Let's do a bit of back-of-the-napkin math to see how many unpaid hours I labored for my cats' account.

I uploaded ~600 pictures. If we conservatively assume each image took 10 minutes to take, edit, upload, and caption, that gives us 100 hours of work.

However, I also had to do:

• hashtag research
• community engagement
• comment replies
• the imagination of the shots

I don't know for sure, but I'd guess it was at least 200 hours of work.

In summary, Instagram, Inc received 200 hours of my labor in posting on their platform and engaging with their users, and all I got in exchange was irregular dopamine hits and some cat toys.

3. I loved taking pictures of my cats — until I hated it.

Here's the thing. When you do something for fun, it's a joy. As soon as you attach a value to it — as soon as you try to monetize your hobby — it can quickly become a burden. Add to that the capriciousness of the algorithm arbitrarily assigning worth to your work, and you have a recipe for emotional and creative burnout.

When I got good results, I was over the moon. When I got bad results, I was crushed. And I could never tell when a shot I loved would do extremely poorly.

It was hard enough that this was of my cats, whom I adore. I can't imagine the drain this would be if it was pictures of yourself or your business.

I take and share more pictures now with my friends and family than I did on the Instagram account because it was so tiring to me.

4. One cat was more popular than another.

I got a massive complex because one of my cats was more beloved by the Instagram community than the other.

Both my Maine Coons are equal and perfect (perfects, even) in my eyes. And it hurt to realize that wasn't the case for my followers.

My gray boy, Chumbo, consistently got twice as many likes as my red girl, Astrid.

Like I said above, when an algorithm arbitrarily assigns worth to your work, that's hard. It's much more complicated when the community you've worked so tirelessly to build gives more worth to one of your adored cats than the other on a non-arbitrary basis.

5. I got bored because the same type of content performed well.

It wasn't just that one of my two cats was more photogenic. It was explicitly one kind of photo of him that did exceptionally well. The images I posted of Chiumbi when he was sitting up, looking into the camera, mane freshly brushed out, did better than all the rest of the content I tried to create.

Honestly, as a creator, I got bored of it. I wanted to try new narratives, new pictures, new locations. My audience wanted the same image over and over.

When people tell you your audience craves diversity and change, they're lying.

6. Instagram’s many convolutions exhausted me.

Finally, I can't say enough how tiring it was to keep up with every new pivot Instagram took. It's a phot sharing app, but they weren't content to remain as such. They started putting more ads into the feed; they added stories; they added the ability to go live.

Then there was the much-touted (and flopped) IGTV, shortly followed by Reels. Then the shopping button. It never stopped.

Just staying on top of the various options was a job in and of itself, to say nothing of working out the kind of content that performed best for the latest iteration of platform and algorithm. When Instagram was promoting IGTV, that was a ticket to viraldom. When Reels were pushed, IGTV died, and Reels flew. I can't tell you what's going on now because I got off that merry-go-round, thankfully.

These six reasons were more than enough to make me give up my hopes of being a confluence for good. I still enjoy taking pictures of my cats and sending them to my friends and family, and I love whipping out that I have Instagram-famous cats whenever I get the chance. But I'm not feeding that beast anymore, and I don't think I ever will again.

When you're a creator, you have to conserve your time and energy carefully. Ten minutes a day can quickly turn into hours and hours down the drain.

To those who want to chase Instagram fame, take it from one sort of influencer to another: the cost is higher than you think.