Why am I addicted to watching videos of people chopping salads? | Sophie Brickman

Microchopping' influencers have turned chopped salads into an Instagram art - and it's a salve for my anxious mind

I went to culinary school, worked as a line cook, then became a mother. Sadly, the upshot of that trajectory is not that my children eat three-course homemade meals every night, but that my Instagram feed is filled almost entirely with videos of people - mostly mothers - chopping salads into tiny dice. Microchopping, in social media parlance.

That big algorithm in the sky has rightly intuited that after most days of work and childcare, and a tripartite bedtime that takes two and a half hours at its most efficient, the only content the shards in my brain can handle consuming are these types of videos - not the novel taunting me from my bedside table, not that longform magazine article everyone is talking about, not even the new movie released on a streaming service.

Sophie Brickman is a contributor to the New Yorker, the New York Times and other publications, and the author of Baby, Unplugged: One Mother's Search for Balance, Reason, and Sanity in the Digital Age. Her first novel, Plays Well With Others, comes out in August 2024