Mainstream social media has made me obsessed with numbers

I never really acknowledged it at first. Even though in my early days of using Instagram, I'd always refresh the page to see if I got anymore likes, but I wasn't like those people, who had no life and relied constantly on social media for happiness, right? RIGHT? Well I was. And I'm starting to see this attitude come back again on neocities. For a while on Instagram, I only started posting on my story, since that didn't have any likes, so I didn't have to worry, but then they went ahead with yet another stupid feature and added likes to Instagram stories!! yayy!!!! So now I get stressed when people don't like my story. great!! It's pretty annoying, I wish I could just upload content without worrying about the likes and views, but modern social media seems to rely on that.

So then I found neocities. There are no likes on neocities, only views. And neocities' algorithm (i guess?) is different than other mainstream social medias (not calling neocities social media, but it is a form of content creation). From what I've seen, It doesn't matter how new or old your site is, they all seem to have an equal chance of getting views and interaction. The views on my site have steadily been going up ever since I started. And that's great! But for some reason I still have this anxiety that if I don't get lots of views at the start my site will be buried within the depths of the neocities community. And I feel a little as if if I stop updating my site, people will stop coming. These worries only really come to me late at night though, in my most anxious time of the day, but I still feel a bit too attached to the numbers.

I think it's just modern social media that has changed how I view things, but also because I'm diagnosed with two forms of anxiety, both with little "SEVERE" tags next to them (I peeked at my doctors computer). But yeah I guess that's just some random stuff about modern social media and me. Hopefully I break out of this negative relationship with numbers.