Instagram has always been something of a challenge for the completists among us—those who feel the compulsion to see every single post that goes up in one’s feed, to not “miss out” on a piece of content. (It’s probably better not to speak about the months-long period where I tried to keep up on the “Following” tab that monitors what posts all your friends on Instagram are liking, too.)

When Instagram first took off, shortly after its launch in 2010, it served as a digital oasis of sorts. Facebook was a junkyard of political rhetoric, photos of babies belonging to parents you went to one year of high school with, and birthday reminders. Twitter was a stream of anxiety-provoking news and memes (O.K., memes aren’t always anxiety-provoking, admittedly). Instagram, by comparison, was serene. By the nature of it being an image-based app, the content shared was generally innocuous, genial fare: breakfasts, vistas, brides. Unlike Twitter, most people followed primarily people they knew in real life, or celebrities and brands they really loved. Scrolling one’s feed could even feel like an intimate experience at times, a way to feel like you were “catching up” with your friends—via double-tapping and emoji-commenting—while you were in fact sitting glumly on a train or anguishing atop the covers on your bed.

Recently, though, while Instagram is certainly still a sunnier (figuratively and, depending on who you follow, literally) nook in one’s phone, it’s also become a bit more chaotic. The introduction of Stories is perhaps the most tangible marker of the shift. Now that users can post fleeting, temporary glimpses from their day-to-day lives, the “barrier” for what is worth posting has changed. Once like opening a door to find a row of neatly arranged brightly colored pebbles, Instagram is now more like opening a door and getting struck with a gushing flood. There are Stories and Stories and more Stories (always more Stories!). At the same time, the feed itself has become increasingly disorienting—a jumble of ads and posts, all arranged non-chronologically (after Instagram decided to introduce an algorithm to structure the feed, rather than display posts in the order they went up).

Perhaps as a response to this sense of disorder, Instagram has recently introduced a new feature that alerts you, when scrolling through your feed, to when you have “caught up” and seen all the new posts that have gone up since the last time you checked. A divider arrives, split in half with a green check mark: “You’re All Caught Up,” it announces, “You’ve seen all new posts from the past 2 days.” At first, this development thrilled me: now I didn’t have to strain to recall when I was caught up in my feed (Ahh, yes, I think I saw Margaret’s Soul Cycle picture when I was scrolling this morning—I must be caught up!); now, the app would actually tell me.

A week or so later, it's starting to feel less like a sweet smile and more like an admonishment. It’s as if I was trying to quit sugar and, every time I reached for a cookie at 3:36 P.M. in my office, a hologram of my elementary-school gym teacher’s face appeared, shaking its head and signaling that the jar is empty. I’ve realized I mindlessly check Instagram so frequently that . . . often I’m only scrolling past three or four new posts before I reach the “You’re All Caught Up.” Had I always been checking Instagram this frequently and just not realized it? (Definitely yes.) Had my complaints about the disorder of the feed not actually affected how often I was opening it? (Seemingly yes.) Did I now feel (even more) ashamed about how often I was checking it? (Also yes.)

What was no doubt meant as a well-intentioned feature to improve the clarity of the user experience is now making me feel like I’m going insane. Every time I open the app, I wait for the “You’re All Caught Up,” like the plot twist I know is coming on a boring network-TV procedural, or the bell that goes off at the end of a class—oh, there it is. What’s next? Instagram alerting me, “You’ve looked at this person’s profile 87 times in the last month, just so you know,” or, perhaps further down the line, “You like almost all this person’s social-media content, but they never like yours. Have a great day!”

Part of the allure of social media is that we do it in what feels like private—that our behaviors are known only to ourselves, that we can present ourselves however we desire. While the introduction of the “You’re All Caught Up!” divider certainly does not change that, it perhaps, even in the most minor of keys, gives the sense that someone is watching, or on to us. And now that I know for sure that I've seen everything, it just leaves me wondering, emptily: what else is there to be looking at?