One afternoon, on a quiet coastal holiday with my family, I lay down for a nap. The day up until then had been full of the simplest pleasures I could recall from my own childhood holidays – cereal in individual serving boxes, running barefoot on the sand, being chased by the tiniest of waves. Then I opened Instagram.

I emerged from my rabbit hole an hour later, bleary-eyed and depressed from consuming reel after reel after reel, from accounts all promising they had cracked the code to parenting. It had started with a mumfluencer promising she could help me become a more playful mother.

She was targeting a specific type of mother with specific anxieties, that I perhaps reveal too much about myself by describing here. Her audience was the mum who wants to be present and playful with her kids but finds it difficult, sometimes boring. The mum who knows how important play is but can’t stay focused for long enough, or doesn’t know how to prioritise. It’s ironic that one of the main culprits for my dwindling attention span and capacity for imagination is likely the very app I was scrolling on.

It feels as though these parenting hack accounts have exploded lately. Every time I open Instagram I am bombarded with reels from accounts I don’t follow, promising they’ve cracked the code to one or other element of motherhood: how to become the fun mum, the present mum, the self-care mum, the personal-style mum.

It’s like entering a surreal immersive art experience: stare down the tunnel and watch the woman doing 80s hip-hop dances in front of her dresser telling you why you don’t look cool in barrel pants, swipe up to the woman picking tomatoes and snapdragons from her garden at sunset, swipe up to the one cataloguing “what I wear to the playground as a mum of two who still wants to look chic”, swipe up to the mother who’s presumably set up a tripod in a car park to film her getting her baby in and out of the car seat.

Next the experience becomes interactive. Don’t you feel this way too? Haven’t you experienced this? I know you have: comment! Comment FUN to receive my guide in your DMs! Comment PLAY comment TIRED comment PRESENT!

All these accounts are preying on common insecurities felt by modern parents: that we don’t play enough, we spend too much time at work, our temper is too short, we’ve lost our personal style and that must mean something deeper about us. And lately, many of these influencers recommend some version of putting down your phone, all the while serving up content that demands more engagement.

It’s an ouroboros of influencing: content makers sharing carefully staged and edited content reminding you life is not content. Reels that show a “real home”, household clutter and dirty dishes now repackaged as a promise to “de-influence” you. Reels that encourage you to resist consumerism while tagging the brands of any outfit worn therein.

But we don’t need any of it! Like my beach holiday reminded me, we have quotidian delights and a world that, no matter how distracted we adults have become, is full of wonder for a child. My four-year-old playing for hours with a unicorn-print pencil case found at a local op shop is proof of this.

I suspect the real key to enjoying play or having more patience or a wilder imagination, or even simply more time, is to exit the hamster wheel altogether. Do this by deleting Instagram and putting your phone away. I say this not to scold, and not even in service of any goals of being more present, playful, engaged (though surely these are outcomes too). I say it because these apps and influencers invite us to play an unwinnable game.

I think it’s perfectly fine for a parent to need a place to zone out. We are tired. If I manage to grab a moment alone and want to spend it doing Wordle or texting friends or browsing 70 versions of nearly identical brown loafers, who really cares?

The thing I want to reject in these moments is the drive to optimise parenthood. I already have my gut instinct which, with enough time away from social media, only gets stronger and louder and more reliable. Funny that scrolling through other parents’ content for hours on end might make you less sure of that instinct.

I want to reject the trick premise that we should, or even can, optimise parenthood. That we should approach raising our children like a project rather than a relationship with a growing person. When we are trying to follow scripts from online we lose our curiosity about these little people whose needs are simple most of the time: love, kindness, belief, safety, calm. Dinner with the green bits picked out.

Instagram is like a slot machine and I guess the fun thing about slot machines is that you do occasionally win. You see the lights go flash and the sound go bing and collect your coins. But the only way to actually win on slot machines is to shut the door and leave them where they are.

• Léa Antigny is a writer based in Sydney