An Alternative to Deciphering Aaron Rodgers’s Instagram Posts? Don’t.

The quarterback will make a decision on whether to return to the Packers. Rather than torture ourselves looking for clues, we can disengage. And wait.

This morning, some of us may have read multiple breakdowns of an Aaron Rodgers photo collage posted on Instagram as if it were the cover of Abbey Road.

While some of this is the self-induced mania that comes during the quiet period between the Super Bowl and draft week, this is also about the time we were expecting a decision from Rodgers as to whether he’d like to return to the Packers. On one hand, his post may just be a tribute to friends, teammates and loved ones, an ode to gratitude which we should all be practicing on a daily basis (thanks for the reminder, Aaron). On the other, it could really be some kind of cryptic notification to the fellow deep thinkers of the world that he is planning to board a plane for Denver (he insisted, during an appearance on The Pat McAfee Show Tuesday, this was not the case).

Today, I offer you an alternative: simply disengage. While it sounds odd coming from a journalistic outfit tasked with relaying this kind of news, Rodgers has wedged himself into a unique corner of the celebrity arena. We’ve been told time and time again how we can never truly understand his complexities. So why try, when there are times we probably can’t understand ourselves? We’ve been accused of twisting his words. So why attempt to grasp them at all?

Let’s look at the two real possibilities and how each one points us to the correct course of action.

Scenario 1: Rodgers really is misunderstood by the press and just wanted to post a sappy collage of pictures to his closest friends, thanking them for the good they do in his life. He said on McAfee that he had just exited a panchakarma, which is an extended spiritual and whole body cleanse.

Scenario 2: Rodgers really does get off on puppeteering the media and reveling in the resulting chaos, using the disarray as a cudgel to bang the drum for his I’m-right-and-you’re-wrong worldview and delighted in the fact that he spiked McAfee’s live viewership (in part, due to McAfee teasing the appearance) with people obsessed with his future. He views us all as ants scrambling around his personal sand hill and will spend the majority of his Tuesday cackling like Sideshow Bob.

Regardless, the response could—if we allow it—be: Who cares?

If Rodgers is genuinely enjoying this holistic journey of self-discovery, we have the option to treat it like we would anyone on our Instagram feed who downloaded the Calm app and started talking like Ram Dass a week later. (This, by the way, is not an anti-meditation take, nor is it a suggestion that Rodgers is a johnny-come-lately to the mindfulness movement; meditation is great, taking care of your body is great, Rodgers seems happy and I’m genuinely thrilled for anyone who is happy. But we all know the people I’m referencing here and we could treat Rodgers like that person.)

If Rodgers is abusing his bully pulpit, we also have the option to mute, unfollow and walk away if it’s truly something that altered the course of our day even one iota. I promise, finding out about a major transaction a day later in the newspaper via officially confirmed channels provides an exhilaration of its own. It’s like living in the 1990s again, and who among us didn’t love that pre-Y2K freedom from a constant pummeling of information? Drop love, not WojBombs.

Rodgers has become a societal Rorschach test, a distinction that has to be exhausting even if it sometimes feels earned. Therein lies the problem: There are times when the public persecution of the quarterback does feel like too much. For example, in the moments following his proclamation on the McAfee Show that he completed a panchakarma, thousands of people Googled the process and posted what they imagined were the most unflattering aspects without the slightest knowledge of what he actually undertook. He was misdiagnosed in a national newspaper with having “COVID toe.” This is exactly the kind of reaction that plays into his cynical ideas of the media and the general public. There are also times when Rodgers will, say, accidentally call out the wrong reporter and submit her to undue online harassment, or call the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention untrustworthy, which—while entirely within his rights as a free-born citizen of the United States—is, in this climate, akin to taking a baseball bat to an ornery beehive.

He is a person who is finding his own voice and personal peace in a very public fashion. We could recognize the whole spectacle as such, which gives us the license to back away without taking any part of it too seriously. Or we could continue to do what we’re doing: hang on every word, obsess over the obsessing, wish that Rodgers would conform into the ideological box that we’ve attempted to squeeze all of our public figures into over the last millennium.

At some point, he will decide to stay in Green Bay or go. Perhaps he wants us to follow him, tongues wagging obediently, down some winding path to find out. But there’s an easier way. And if we wait, the time will come when he’s revealed exactly what he means.