Grief in the Algorithm: Healing in a World Obsessed with Fixing
Guest post by Anya-Rose Salisbury
Trigger warning: grief, death and loss
In the days and weeks following my mum’s death, I did exactly what most of my generation is conditioned to do in moments of emotional crisis: I turned to the internet. There, I found endless accounts citing ‘healing checklists’ and mental health mantras, marketed wellness routines and curated guides to self-care. My TikTok and Instagram algorithms offered me a steady stream of neatly packaged suggestions: gym sessions, journaling, bubble baths, protein shakes, gratitude lists. These rituals became the framework for my grief, not because they addressed the wound, but because they allowed me to simulate control over it.
A deep-rooted aversion to discomfort shapes contemporary society. We are socialised into a culture of quick fixes and visible resilience, where healing is understood not as an embodied, ongoing process but as something to overcome. In this context, grief becomes a problem to be solved, rather than a landscape to be moved through. The pressure to ‘get better’, and to do so quickly, permeates even the most intimate aspects of loss.
This mindset is no accident. It reflects broader capitalist logics of productivity, which have infiltrated our thinking about health and emotional recovery. Gabor Maté suggests, “All of Western medicine is built on getting rid of pain, which is not the same as healing.” Healing, as Maté defines it, is the capacity to hold pain. In the age of the internet, we are rarely encouraged to hold anything for long, especially not suffering. This is mirrored in what we see online. Whilst there is a positively growing digital platform for mental health, I’m often exposed to the ‘end result’, and rarely to people amidst their suffering. Instead, we are offered narratives of tidy recoveries, shared in carousel posts and recovery reels, each implicitly suggesting that pain can be resolved if we simply follow the right protocol.
My early grieving process became meticulously structured—my days divided into those I deemed ‘productive’ and those I did not. A good day was a tick-list: 10,000 steps, kale, meditation, journal. A bad day meant I had cried too much or done too little. These rituals functioned as strategies of avoidance, offering routine in place of resolution. While they supported a veneer of stability and mental hygiene, the emotional core of my grief remained unaddressed—pressing against the surface, unresolved and insistent. The ache of loss persisted.
Social media magnified this dynamic: platforms that promised community also teased comparison. The content I consumed on wellness and resilience rarely made space for the parts of grief that are messy or silent. I now run a grief-focused Instagram account (@navigating.grief.as.a.teenager), and have to wrestle with these contradictions first-hand. I try to be intentional: if I don’t feel up to posting, I don’t. That’s a boundary I’ve learnt to honour. In doing so, I’ve come to believe that healing doesn’t always happen in the spotlight.
Whether or not you run an account, we all deserve boundaries with our digital lives. We deserve to feel our grief in ways that aren’t shaped by what the internet applauds. The culture of constant sharing can be comforting, but it can become another space to prove that we’re coping ‘well’. I hope that by modelling slowness and honesty, others see healing as a nonlinear process. Still, I often wonder: who would I have become in my grief if I hadn’t been shaped by this culture of fixing?
The distinction between mental hygiene—the practices that help us manage our minds—and mental health, requiring deeper emotional processing, is critical here. The former can offer valuable scaffolding, but when mistaken for the latter, it risks compounding pain with self-judgement. I wasn’t failing at healing; I was quietly holding pain in a world that demanded I reframe it as growth. True healing started when I met my pain. When I went offline and began therapy, my feelings became validated instead through real-life connections.
We need a new framework for grief, one that resists the algorithmic and capitalist tendency to streamline and resolve. Healing cannot be optimised: it must be lived. Sometimes it looks like stillness, like collapse, like not posting. The internet gave me language for my grief, but it also imposed expectations. My task now is to unlearn them.
We’d love to hear your reflections on life online or offline, if you’d like to write for our guest newsletter, get in touch: loggingoffclub@gmail.com
Anya-Rose Salisbury is a 22 year old writer based in Australia and the founder of @navigating.grief.as.a.teenager.
loved writing this and have so much love for Logging Off💛