Filling out the DS-160 made me realize I have too many digital ghosts

That strange moment when you realize the internet never actually forgets

I spent the better part of last Sunday afternoon hunched over my laptop, staring at the DS-160 form for a US visa. Everyone says it’s just a standard procedure, but when you hit that section asking for your social media handles from the last five years, it hits differently. I thought I had cleaned everything up years ago. Turns out, I was wrong. I sat there for a solid hour just scrolling through my own history, trying to remember if I had deleted that old public blog or just stopped posting on it. It’s annoying how something as simple as a digital footprint can suddenly feel like a massive hurdle when you’re just trying to plan a trip. I ended up listing one LinkedIn profile, five YouTube accounts—even those burner ones where I just logged in to save a playlist—and two Instagram accounts. Even though I had already deleted my Facebook, I had to account for it because the five-year window is a stubborn rule.

Why my LinkedIn feels more like a graveyard than a professional tool

I’ve been watching how everyone uses LinkedIn lately, and it’s honestly getting a bit weird. You open the feed and half of it feels like it wasn’t even written by a human. There was this recent report mentioning that something like 41% of posts and 30% of comments on the platform might be AI-generated. I believe it. Every time I see a post about a ‘strategic pivot’ or ‘leveraging synergy,’ I just scroll past. It’s hard to tell who is actually looking for a job and who is just letting a bot keep their profile active so the algorithm doesn’t bury them. I remember back when LinkedIn was just a static list of where you worked, but now it feels like a constant performance. I wonder if anyone actually reads the stuff people post, or if we’re all just shouting into a void of automated updates.

The weird trend of everyone leaving big tech at once

I saw a flurry of updates recently about executives leaving places like OpenAI. They all write the same thing, don’t they? A nice, polished paragraph on LinkedIn about ‘pursuing new opportunities’ or ‘starting a new chapter.’ It makes you wonder what’s actually happening behind the scenes. It’s a bit jarring to see people who have been at a company for eight years just walk away with a short note. It feels like the era of the ‘AI Mafia’ is repeating what the PayPal guys did, but at a pace that’s kind of dizzying. You see a $40 billion ARR milestone mentioned in one post and a resignation announcement in the next. It’s a lot to process while I’m just trying to figure out if I need to make my Instagram public just to prove I’m a real person to a visa officer.

Dealing with the anxiety of public vs private profiles

So, after agonizing over the form, I decided to just set my Instagram accounts to public. It felt like a strange surrender. The government essentially wants to see that you exist as a normal human, but the internet has made it so easy to curate a fake reality. My LinkedIn is basically a skeleton—just dates and titles—which I suppose is safer. I spent around $160 for the visa fee, and honestly, the administrative stress of the application process is already costing me more in pure exhaustion. I’m still not sure if I should have just left those YouTube accounts off the list. What if they check the history and see I haven’t watched anything in four years? It probably doesn’t matter, but you start thinking about the most trivial things when you’re stuck in this kind of bureaucratic loop.

The lingering uncertainty of keeping it all updated

I suppose the main issue is that we are all forced to keep these digital histories alive, whether we like it or not. I keep thinking about how much easier it would be if I could just wipe it all clean and start from scratch, but that’s not an option if you want to be ‘verifiable.’ Even when you try to stay under the radar, you’re still technically part of a database. I finished the form, pressed submit, and felt this weird urge to go back and check if I missed anything. I probably did. But at some point, you just have to stop looking and hope that the information you provided is enough to prove you’re just a person and not some weird AI-generated persona trying to cross a border.