Why I finally quit Instagram once and for all
A few weeks ago, I woke up at 3am with the crystal-clear thought: I have to quit Instagram. This untimely thought arrived right as two friends and I were promoting our upcoming retreat on social media. It could not have been more inconvenient.
Truth is, I’ve tried all the lukewarm methods or curbing my social media use over the years. I’ve deleted the app from my phone, set timers and placed my phone in another room. But one thing I’ve never been able to curb is how using this app makes me feel, or the addictive hold it has over me. I might be able to go days without using it, but when I do, it makes me feel awful. More specifically, it makes me feel disconnected from my own truth and my immediate relationships.
When my use of Instagram started to remind me of my relationship with alcohol in my teens, I knew it was time to disregard all the reasons for using it in ‘moderation’ for my business and get the hell off.
Instagram addiction is as socially acceptable as binge drinking was in my circle as a teen.
When I tried my first drink at 14, I felt the immediate answer to a problem I had never named, only felt: social anxiety. Like millions of other humans around the world, I used alcohol as a ticket to instant freedom from inhibition around others. It gave me the solution to the problem of finally feeling close to my peers and finding comfort in my own skin. For the first time ever, I could completely let go and have fun without overthinking how I was performing socially. It was belonging wrapped up in a bottle of lemon-flavoured sub-zero.
Looking back, the strangest thing was how socially acceptable it was in my peer group to sink ten beers on a Saturday night, sleep late on Sunday and show up for school on Monday with a lingering hangover. I remember wishing there were other ways I could connect with my friends. I also struggled to figure out alternative ways to manage social anxiety outside of drinking but there just didn’t seem to be any, outside of avoiding social interaction altogether.
Years later, I’m now 41 and the feeling I get when I use social media strikes me as eerily similar to my experience with alcohol as a teen. Hear me out.
Remember the birth of Instagram? The aesthetically-pleasing app promised so much – connection, reconnection, belonging, creativity. It was a platform for us to share our authentic selves with each other and finally find our people. The advertised perks of Instagram, in particular, remind me of what I loved about alcohol: connection without vulnerability, easy likes and acceptance and the tantalising possibility of sudden popularity. A chance to present ourselves as we aspired to be.
But like alcohol, Instagram has always left me feeling empty, hungover and somewhat ashamed, after, of course, the initial dopamine high that it is programmed to deliver. It rarely gifts me with the real sense of belonging and authentic connection it promises yet, like everyone else, I keep coming back, craving the scraps it throws and convincing myself I need it because it’s normal and everyone else has it. And, just as skipping the weekly parties to hang at home with my mum used to give me FOMO, so did the terrifying idea of deleting Instagram.
Yet the alternative is beginning to feel worse. Prior to my 3am epiphany, I was losing my mind and intuitively sensed that Instagram had something to do with it.
I wondered who I would be now and what my life would look like if I hadn’t completely stopped binge drinking when my daughter was born 13 years ago.
What beautiful moments would I have missed with my children amid shame-filled Sunday hangovers? Would my marriage have survived the inevitable drunken flirtations that occur at 3am, ten beers deep? I doubt it.
Instead of this grim picture, my life since the age of 27 has been imperfect yet lucid, alive and adventurous. I feel relatively stable inside. I haven’t lost myself, and my marriage continues to be a constant joy. Our kids have the benefit of two flawed but present humans owning our shit sand continuing to grow together. We travel, have adventures and dream big dreams. It’s what I always wanted, and somewhere along the road I realised that binge drinking wasn’t going to help me get here.
I can’t help but wonder, again, how much better I could feel if I didn’t shoulder this low-key, perfectly normal and socially acceptable addiction to Instagram. I’ve been in my ‘letting go’ era for a while, dabbling with deleting the app for a month here or there and each time I return, I notice that the platform makes me feel increasingly distracted, irritable and bad about myself. With perimenopause kicking in I just don’t think I can afford to stay in this state for long.
I want to spend the rest of my life feeling fully alive, not hijacked by some tech companies who understand human psychology better than me yet don’t have my best interests at heart.
Instagram dulls my senses and frazzles my nervous system. It makes me feel excluded after promising to help me connect and belong. It hijacks my unconscious mind and wastes my precious time. Sure, we all need it to make money and stay in touch with our friends, but….do we? Is it worth it? Are there other ways to make money and have friends?
I reckon I’ll have to try harder to stay connected to people. Maybe I’ll lose some connections. I might feel a bit scared and left out. And just like I enjoy the odd glass of wine on holidays, I’ll have a scroll through my daughter’s feed with her and laugh at the memes and I’ll use facebook to buy things on marketplace. It’s not all bad, and I’ll miss some of the artistry and inspiration I found on Instagram. But I know that, for me, the bad is outweighing the good and my nervous system isn’t built for having this technology on hand. I want my mind back.
Having to make decisions like these seems to be something I’m masochistically drawn to.
It’s frustrating to be someone who just can’t seem to handle things that other people have little to no issues with. I’ve tried talking to people I know about getting off Instagram and they don’t seem to be interested. They either genuinely need it for their work, think they need it for their work when they really don’t or just don’t feel the bad feelings I seem to experience when I use it. Just as I longed for someone else to say, ‘this actually sucks’ when we were all getting shit-faced in our teens, I wish someone close to me would say the same now about Instagram. I wish everyone would just ditch it so I didn’t have to miss out on anything.
But it ain’t gonna happen. And I’m still going to brave it and search for belonging within myself. I want to return to my roots, to put my easily distracted brain at ease, and find out what it’s made for. I want to write poems again, read books, play music and stare into space or talk strangers in the checkout line at Woolies. I’m looking forward to leaning into the the Instagram-shaped hole in my life and watching what emerges.
Are you also curious about life without Instagram? Let me know what you think in the comments!
