Every morning when I wake up, I do my morning yoga, make a green smoothie, go for a gentle run before I have a similarly gentle warm shower and complete my seven-step skincare routine. All this before I look at the phone, the little device that controls my life and connects me to the horrors of the world.

Kidding: The moment I wake up, I roll over, clamber for my phone and immediately check my notifications. More often than not this includes a few good mornings from my daily friends, newsletters in my inbox and at least one Instagram Reel in my DMs. That is the notification that I invariably check first.

This morning I got an ad for a mutual friend’s show, a terrifying video about an “artistic collective’s domestic experiment” (just say polyamory), a dark video about which of my six of my friends would carry my casket, and one of the many joyous clips of TS Madison saying “not the bore worms!”.

Following this, I did my usual womb-scroll – my personal term for the kind of scrolling that makes you feel cocooned in the womb, rather than surrounded by doom – before I arrived at a video that brings my joy on a daily basis: A beauty pageant contestant is asked, “What is your biggest mistake?” Her reply, cut off with the comedic timing that only a five second internet video can have, “The biggest beef steak!”.

From there, my morning routine continues. Healthy processes may or may not be involved.

I am deeply aware that admitting that I watch Instagram Reels ages me more accurately than if you cut me open and counted my rings. Yes, I am dead-centre in the middle of the millennial era. I remember when, to use the internet, you had to wait for one minute of the computer screaming at you, which is an oddly fitting metaphor for the state of the internet in the present day.

I have maybe four friends I send multiple Reels to every day, usually accompanied by a one word message: “you”, “me”, “us”, [redacted name]. I usually pause whatever I’m doing that day, such as writing this article, to scroll for about five minutes through the algorithm to find the perfect video to send these people. I do not search, I do not seek, I merely find.

So what does my algorithm show me? Well, millennials lip syncing to the same audio from videos that were big on TikTok a year ago, Family Guy clips with vaguely aligned subtitles, the occasional ad for a show that I’ve already bought tickets for, bad cooking videos, good cooking videos, cooking videos intended to bait me, and videos that went viral 10 years ago. It’s the internet equivalent of picking a random shelf at the library and browsing through it hoping to find gold.

Which is all to say that the Instagram Reels algorithm shows me nothing I might actively seek out to watch, and that’s why I love it. It’s functionally useless to find anything with determination, akin to a guide dog that didn’t get through training. Cute, a bit of fun, not fit for its intended function.

Which brings me to why I’ve avoided TikTok – it’s too good. (I also have a firm belief that every time you post a selfie taken with your front-facing camera, it takes a little bit of your soul, but that’s a take for another story…)

I know that I can find anything I want on TikTok. I could learn many things that might improve my life, like figuring out how to open a can without slicing my hand open, or the quickest and easiest way to clean the corners of my shower. However, I also know that I would find things I didn’t know that I want to find, and would honestly prefer not to find. Demographically, I’m much less likely to encounter the opinion of a human whose frontal cortex is still forming on Reels than I am on TikTok.

TikTok, from what I know and hear about it, makes it as easy as possible to consume videos (or “content”, a word that means both everything and nothing). It also learns from what you watch and serves up more of the same. I don’t need that, and nobody needs that. I’d rather be spending my time on an app that can barely figure out I don’t want to see midwestern Americans making intentionally bad food, which is one step removed from buying a phone without any internet access. And let’s not be wild here!

I’m not advocating against TikTok – and this is barely an advertisement for Instagram Reels. I’ll be honest: Reels is basically vaping to TikTok’s smoking. Neither’s good for you, but one might be a bit better for you, because honestly it’s a bit worse. But if you want to wean off an app that knows you more intimately than even your best friends do, and switch to an app that barely functions, for the sake of your own mental health or maybe screen time, consider Reels. You could make a bigger beef steak.