A Taoist, a Witch, a Buddhist, and a Pagan Walk Into Instagram

As I scroll social media, I often encounter messaging from people who identify as witches, Taoists, Buddhists, pagans, and others whose traditions are rooted in deep sensitivity to energy, consciousness, nature, and the unseen forces that shape our lives. It got me wondering: how would someone who truly embodied these traditions in a more traditional sense react to social media itself?

After all, social media is hardly a neutral environment. Its energies are complex, its incentives are powerful, and its rhythms are far removed from the natural cycles that many of these traditions seek to align with. In short, it is energetically and ecologically expensive (see this post and this post).

So let's conduct a thought experiment.

Imagine a witch, a Taoist alchemist, a Buddhist monk, and a pagan elder suddenly arriving from a pre-industrial, technology-free world and encountering social media for the very first time.

What would they see?

What would concern them?

What would they recognize immediately that many of us have stopped noticing?

And perhaps most importantly, would they participate?

A Witch

The very energies that penetrate through social media are the kinds of disruptive energies a witch would actively protect herself from. She would be creating spells, rituals, protection, cleansing, grounding, boundaries, and practices to guard her attention rather than willingly handing it over.

A witch, at least in the archetypal sense, is someone who understands energy. Someone who pays attention to what influences consciousness, what extracts vitality, what shapes behavior, and what severs us from our instincts. She develops practices to protect against those forces.

She understands that not everything that influences us arrives in physical form. Some forces enter through stories, images, symbols, desires, fears, expectations, and collective emotional currents.

She would recognize that every space carries an energetic signature and that social media is saturated with energies that demand discernment. Energies of comparison, performance, envy, outrage, scarcity, constant consumption, never being enough, endless striving, needing to be seen, needing to matter.

A witch would likely notice how these energies move through the body. How comparison can tighten the chest, outrage can hijack attention, endless scrolling can leave a person feeling depleted, restless, fragmented, and disconnected from themselves.

She would understand that attention is not just a psychological resource but also an energetic one. And she would be cautious about placing herself in an environment specifically designed to pull upon it.

If a witch understands that certain forests, crossroads, rivers, spirits, or gatherings carried energies that required respect and caution, why would she assume the digital realm is any different?

She would not fear these forces but she also wouldn't invite them into her home without question. She would know that what repeatedly enters our field eventually shapes us.

And so she would ask:

What energies am I feeding?

What energies am I strengthening?

What energies am I allowing to live inside me?

And perhaps most importantly: What energies am I no longer able to hear because of all the noise?

A Taoist

A Taoist alchemist would be deeply cautious about social media, not because it is evil, but because it is energetically expensive.

The work of inner alchemy is the refinement and protection of one's jing (essence), qi (energy/lifeforce), and shen (spirit/purpose). It is the cultivation of clarity over distraction, presence over fragmentation, essence over excess.

A Taoist adept would understand that every environment carries an energetic signature and that prolonged exposure shapes consciousness. He would be discerning about what enters his field, his mind, and his spirit.

He would do this because shen is easily disturbed. Constant stimulation scatters it, endless comparison agitates it, the demand to perform depletes it, the pressure to be seen inflames it, and the flood of information fragments it.

An alchemist spends years gathering and refining his energy. Why would he willingly place himself inside a system specifically engineered to disperse it?

The Taoist path is one of returning scattered energy to the body, attention to the present moment, awareness to what is real, immediate, and alive. But social media does the opposite and pulls our attention outward, scattering our awareness across hundreds of lives that are not our own. It fragments presence into notifications, metrics, opinions, and endless demands for engagement.

A Taoist alchemist would not be impressed by followers, reach, or influence. Rather, he would ask a different question:

What is the cost to the shen?

Because a person can gain an audience while losing themselves, gain visibility while losing vitality, gain influence while losing their connection to the Tao. And from the perspective of inner alchemy, this is not a worthwhile trade.

A Pagan (or other Earth-based groups)

A pagan would likely recognize social media as a powerful spirit of our age, but not one to engage with casually.

For most of human history, people measured their lives through their relationships: to land, waters, forests, ancestors, neighbors, seasons, and the living community around them. Today we measure our lives through followers, views, likes, shares, and reach.

That shift would concern a pagan because a pagan understands that what we give our attention to becomes sacred. What we return to daily becomes an altar. What shapes our thoughts, emotions, and behavior becomes a force worthy of examination.

And so the question becomes:

What are we worshipping?

What receives our devotion?

What are we making offerings to every day?

Because every reel, every post, every scroll is an offering of attention. Every hour spent cultivating an online identity is an hour not spent listening to birdsong, watching the sunset, tending a garden, sharing a meal, sitting by a river, or knowing the names of the plants growing outside your door.

A pagan would not mistake connection to an algorithm for connection to the living world.

They would know the difference between being witnessed by thousands of strangers and belonging to a place. They would know the difference between visibility and relationship.

And they would likely question whether a life spent performing ourselves is pulling us farther from the wildness we claim to seek.

A Buddhist

A Buddhist would not necessarily ask whether social media is good or bad. They would ask whether it increases or decreases suffering. They would observe how easily social media feeds craving: the craving to be seen, validated, approved of, admired, and remembered. They would notice how it fuels comparison, attachment to identity, and endless wanting.

A Buddhist understands that the mind is already prone to grasping. Social media industrializes that process. It turns desire into a business model. Every notification, like, comment, and follower becomes another invitation to seek fulfillment outside ourselves.

A Buddhist might look at the endless cycle of posting, checking, refreshing, comparing, and seeking engagement and recognize it immediately as attachment and craving. The very conditions that keep suffering alive.

The question would not be, "How much attention can I gain?" but rather "What is this doing to my mind?"

The Sovereign Individual

A person genuinely concerned with sovereignty would likely be troubled by the amount of influence social media exerts over thought, behavior, values, and even identity.

Sovereignty is not simply freedom to do what we want but the ability to govern ourselves, think independently, and act from our own values rather than external pressures.

Social media is designed to shape behavior. It tells us what matters, what is trending, what deserves outrage, what deserves attention, what success looks like, and increasingly, who we should be. A sovereign person would be deeply suspicious of any system whose profitability depends on influencing human behavior at scale.

They would ask:

Who benefits from my attention?

Who profits from my outrage?

Who is shaping my desires?

Who is deciding what I see and what I don't?

A sovereign person would recognize that attention is power. And surrendering that attention without discernment is, in many ways, surrendering a portion of one's freedom. The goal would not be to disconnect from the world but to ensure that one's mind remains one's own.

So what do you think? Do you think these time-travellers from the past would choose to use social media? And do you think we, as people who claim identities within these roles, should be leveraging ourselves, our identities, and our messages through social media when it undermines the very beautiful nature of these worldviews?

I had thought about going even deeper into what the anti-colonialist, the anti-capitalist, the climate activist, the Christian, the Muslim, etc., etc. would say but I think there would be many similar threads so I leave it here for you to ponder.

It's kind of a fun yet illuminating thought experiment, don't you think?