I think if you treat Instagram (or Twitter/TikTok/...) as a professional tool and distance yourself personally from it, it can probably be a great place to prom

I think if you treat Instagram (or Twitter/TikTok/...) as a professional tool and distance yourself personally from it, it can probably be a great place to promote your work and keep up-to-date with your industry. By creating boundaries on when you post, how often you check it, who you follow etc. you can probably have a healthy relationship with it. That said, this requires you to swim upstream and fight against the design. It's designed to create an addict. It wants to grab as much of your attention as possible and will do it in the most devious of ways. Outside of its design, the entire ecosystem of social media encourages people to present themselves in certain ways, which fosters insecurities on both ends: "I need to show everyone that my life is great" and on the other hand "why is everyone having more fun then me". I know you didn't mention TikTok but I remember the first and only time I used TikTok being so cynically impressed with how well they had curated the first 10 or 15 minutes of your time on the platform. When you open the app, it begins to show you videos of young, attractive women, usually dancing. As you continue to scroll, you see that this gets interleaved with other genres of monkey-brain content. It works incredibly well and after 20 minutes or so I had to delete it.