Instagram Made Me Buy It

Which is all to say: Instagram works. Tara Dubbs, 31, is a copywriter who feels like, because she's in the advertising business, she should know better than be sucked in. And yet: “My shoe collection is a result of targeted ads. It’s as if my Instagram knows how to infiltrate my willpower,” she says. “I do not need a deep commitment to Sunday Riley skin products. But I have one.”

Yes, it’s possible to opt out, albeit slowly: Instagram gives users the option to offer feedback ("not appropriate," "not relevant," or "I see it too often") on ads, though I might sooner cut off my thumbs to spite my phone. Part of me wants the ads to slow down because of the money I'm spending, but another part can't bear to miss out on discovering cool new stuff. It's this conflict that makes me wonder: How are hyper-targeted advertisements, coming directly at us from our social feeds, shaping our shopping habits in the long run, and maybe even our psychology?

April Lane Benson, Ph.D., is a therapist in New York City who specializes in shopping addiction, as well as the author of To Buy or Not to Buy: Why We Overshop and How to Stop. She said that, while there isn’t yet enough data to understand the impact of social media on shopping addiction, her bottom line is this: “You can never get enough of what you don’t really need.” And Instagram has made trying to fill an unfillable sense of need as easy as it could possibly be.

Still, Benson stressed that there’s a big difference between impulse shopping or overspending and shopping addiction. Most ads on Instagram appeal to impulses—showing us things we want in the moment—that mirror our tastes in a way that makes them seem almost fated for our shopping baskets. A compulsion, on the other hand, is like a rule you’ve made for yourself that you have to do something (or, in this case, buy something) even if you don’t want to.

“Shopping is like any addiction: To stop doing it you have to understand why you do it: what triggers it, why you do it, what the consequences are, what the costs and the benefits of changing and continuing, knowing what your underlying authentic needs are rather than derailing them unsuccessfully by the shopping.” I asked if it’s worse that the items are in your personal feed and often tailored to you? “Absolutely,” Benson replied.

We’re also more vulnerable to buying things we don’t need than ever before. “Everyone has a smartphone, and we live on them, we give our power to them,” says Nancy Irwin, Psy.D., an addictions therapist at Seasons in Malibu. “The danger is that we’re on them so much, and the marketers know so much, and the ads have kind of taken over.” And despite what we often tell ourselves, willpower isn’t a muscle that gets stronger the more you use it, adds Irwin: A lot of what drives our buying behavior happens in our unconscious mind, and that’s what’s being hijacked by our hyper-targeted feeds.

“Sometimes you’re so sick of seeing that pink blouse that keeps cropping up that you get the fuck-its: You buy it because it’s the only way to relieve the anxiety of seeing it everywhere," Irwin says.

Which brings me back to the pink Sleeper dress, which I haven’t hit “buy” on. Yet. It keeps showing up in my social feeds, almost teasingly. But other places as well: A friend sent me a link to it recently, with the subject line “This is so you.” I opened the email to find exactly the item I had put in my cart weeks ago, the one that continues to wear me down. When I asked my friend where she found it, she told me it found her. Obviously: on Instagram.

Elizabeth Kiefer is a New York–based writer and editor.