Across the lonesome, fractured internet, a solitary figure rides. She’s got her phone tucked into her breast pocket, and so her followers look out from her saddle, on her buckskin gelding, in a cattle drive. Her horse tries nudging a slow-moving calf, and when that doesn’t work, he stretches out his golden neck to nibble its back. The calf takes off with a startled MOO. The cowgirl reaches down her leather-gloved hand to pat the horse’s neck. She leans back, and the long Montana sky glows before the viewers, transforming into the blue light flickering upon a million mesmerized eyeballs.
The internet loves a cowgirl. Her life is full of cute animals, gorgeous scenery, beautiful women, cool boots. Social media is essentially visual; flowing manes amid a wild Western landscape make for compelling content.
The cowgirl is a potent symbol of the West, and yet more widely acceptable than the cowboy. The cowboy, after all, conjures up John Wayne; his spurs got that nationalist jingo-jangle, and he gets claimed by the right for oversimplified whitewashed stories of the messy West. The cowgirl, by dint of her gender, has got a bit of subversion and political ambiguity tucked in her back pocket.
As the government and economy crumble, the cowgirl beckons online. Who doesn’t want to gallop away from it all? If artificial intelligence threatens your livelihood, you might yearn for self-sufficiency and a job where “AI” still means a chute, a cow, a tube of bull sperm — good ol’ artificial insemination.
The digital cowgirl rides that uneven terrain between yearning fantasy and the disappearing real. In these modern times, people still live like this.
I still live like this.
As a Montana rancher, I spend quiet evenings out on long, open vistas, in the haze of a life worth dreaming about. At any moment, I can gallop out into the wide blue aspirational offline. And yet here I sit on my couch, watching cowgirl content like anyone else.
The algorithm has identified me as a woman interested in rural living, and so my Instagram feed is full of cowgirl videos, ranching tips and ads for quick solutions to problems I didn’t realize I had. Just massage your jaw for 20 minutes a day to get rid of that excess cortisol. Comment “EQUESTRIAN” for a free introductory guide to fixing your posture in the saddle.
I am fed Western content and feel pulled to create it. Much of my life isn’t all that picturesque — paying bills, mucking out manure-filled horse trailers. But it is often beautiful. I am out on the plains, cattle rambling through the flowering sage, and my phone itches in my pocket. It’s the kind of thing that should be shared. A click, and the scene beams up and out on a trillionaire’s satellite. When I check to see who watched it, it’s a long string of half-familiar names from past lives, that strange stew of old co-workers, exes’ friends, strangers met once in a bar in a distant city. I’m no influencer, but I feel the glow of online approval. I don’t just get a dopamine hit; I feel a rush of affection for the life and the woman on screen, which is mine and me, just only the best bits in the most flattering lighting.
I could lie and say that I’m just trying to share a little beauty, or that it’s good for keeping in touch, or that internet communities can be as meaningful as those offline. We tell ourselves stories in order to live online. That rush of affection for my own life — it’s like I’m forever talking to and about myself under a semi-public eye. And so I’m increasingly uncomfortable with what social media is doing to me, and to how I see my world.
In 1985, Neil Postman published Amusing Ourselves to Death, in which he argued that a culture’s dominant form of communication shapes how it thinks. Postman was concerned about America’s transformation from literate to TV-loving. “In every tool we create, an idea is embedded that goes beyond the function of the thing itself,” Postman wrote. The idea embedded in television was that everything needed to be aesthetically pleasing and/or entertaining. Everything. Every dip in attention meant a channel flip.
I wonder what Postman would think today, with our culture’s TikToktonian attention spans. Our dominant communication tools — social media — are designed to draw us in over and over. We are constantly connected. Unable to sit with a physical book for long, I listened to Postman’s audiobook while driving the tractor.
“At any moment, I can gallop out into the wide blue aspirational offline.”
Perhaps the problem isn’t the dopamine hit we get from the occasional selfie. Maybe it’s that the internet interferes with, and even supersedes, reality. Everything is potential content. Filming cows in the sage takes me out of the moment. I turn what could be simple appreciation into an advertisement for my own life.
To be honest, I can be ambivalent about this way of living. Ranching is hard, complicated work, and every time I feel like I’m making headway, it humbles me. On bad days, I wonder if I’m cut out for it. I miss the comforts of the city — lots of friends, easier dating, jobs that didn’t weigh so heavily on my sense of self.
Lonely and anxious, I open my phone. Advice for dealing with avoidant men mingles with tips for dealing with anxious horses. An ex resurfaces in my messages to suggest I start an OnlyFans, dressing scantily to do ranch chores. I can’t tell if he’s trying to flirt or fight. I imagine myself in a bikini trying to troubleshoot QuickBooks over email with the accountant.
Images of confident, capable cowgirls stream by. One influencer does chores, lifting bales, her vintage-jeans-clad butt often angled toward the camera. Her face looks tired; she has so much to do on a small Montana homestead, cleaning up after storms, taking care of sick critters, feeding, editing videos, monitoring partnership offers from Wrangler. Another influencer reads her poetry in a voice I want to curl up in, paired with footage of her driving tractors and taking care of horses. She stares into the camera with so much warmth and want, I feel like she’s both looking right at me, and reflecting back my own hunger. I scroll away.
I know cowgirls. They’ve given me saddles and acted as moral North Stars. Their advice comes with the caveat that everyone does things differently and I’ll find a way that works for me. They are brave and kind — and blessedly offline. Some belong to an older generation, but all seem too caught up in living and ranching to care about social media. They wouldn’t be approached to sell an anti-wrinkle-cortisol-busting serum, except perhaps as a before photo. They wouldn’t want that sort of attention anyway.
People still live like this. I could still live like this.
For now, I refresh my Western aspirational feed and offer my own world into the unending internet stream. I think of the cowgirls caught up between aching fantasy and the disappearing real, and how social media keeps pulling us away from the hardness and beauty of this life. I imagine us scattered underneath the dark sky, our smartphones glowing like the only campfires for miles.
We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.
This article appeared in the September 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Even cowgirls get the Instagram blues.”
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
