Life sans Instagram.
My thoughts after trying the new 'offline' trend.
Just like the Italians vacate the cities for the month of August, I decided to vacate my social media accounts for the second act of summer. My screen-time average went down from 3 hours 36 minutes per day in July (with 71 pickups 🙈) to 1 hour 29 minutes per day in August (with 35 pickups). It comes as no surprise that spending less time on my phone resulted in less anxiety and more creativity. There’s a lot to say about how I felt last month. There were times of loneliness and confusion, several personal realizations, and an overall sense of relief. Instagram and I have been together for over a decade and it was about time we had a serious chat. Sometimes you need to take a break from a relationship to see that your needs aren’t being met.
Let’s start by setting the stage. My most used social media app is Instagram, so that got deleted. I’m not a Facebook/Twitter user or YouTube watcher and I’ve never created a TikTok account - so nothing needed to be deleted on those fronts. Pinterest got the boot (just for good measure). We don’t have a TV, and we only activate our Netflix account for the winter months, so there was no binge watching happening. I did go to the movie theatre to watch Barbie though - twice (debating a third).
Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t off-grid or anything.
I still used my phone everyday for: texting, reading emails (mostly Substacks), playing the daily games on The New York Times app, listening to podcasts, taking pictures, and letting Google Maps direct me.
I also work on a computer Monday thru Thursday and although I’m not browsing the internet, I’m still clocking my fair share of screen time.
Alright, back to the first of August. It’s crazy how addicted I was. For the first day or two without Instagram, my fingers would muscle memory their way to where the app used to be and open the app currently in Instagram’s place. By the time my brain caught up (confused about why I was looking at Uber when I wasn’t planning on going anywhere), I realized I had done it all subconsciously - a little disturbing.
There were also the moments I found myself in picturesque settings and felt they were being wasted because I wasn’t capturing them to share online. ‘Such good content’ I would think to myself, as if the pleasurable moments in life are simply here for us to create content out of. I looked around at the people I was with - people I love and adore, people I look up to. None of them were having the same thoughts as me, because none of them actively share their lives on social media. They were investing their time in the moment, and I was off thinking about how I could re-create the moment later to get some dopamine hits online. I felt so lame. We all know the only thing wasted about those picturesque settings was the fact that I was spending any time at all thinking about something else.
To be fair, I would like to note that taking pictures and capturing beauty is something I have always enjoyed doing. I won’t be extreme and choose to never document parts of my life just to prove a point. Instead, I started asking myself when I wanted to whip out my phone: are you taking this picture to gain status/credit online - or are you taking it to capture the beauty for yourself? I took less photos in August for sure, but the photos I did take held more meaning.
After two weeks sans the scroll, I started to find my groove. I was living this mysterious life where nobody knew how I was choosing to spend my days - unless of course we talked about it in person. It felt so freeing, almost like travelling. You know that feeling you get when you walk down the street in another country and think to yourself, ‘nobody knows who I am right now, I could be anyone!’ - it was like that.
When I met up with friends, I was so genuinely curious about what they had been up to - I was much more attentive to the details of their stories and it felt good to listen. However, there were also settings where I found myself more anxious. I was no longer able to rely on the recently posted events of my instagram acquaintances to create small talk. The classic ‘deer in the headlights’ reaction happened a few times.
There were also days when I felt a little lonely, like I was missing out on stories everyone must be talking about and laughing at the hilarious memes people come up with. It felt like I was removed from the global group text or something. But then I thought… when was the last time I spent an hour (or more) scrolling on social media and afterwards said to myself: “that was really enjoyable, I’m so glad I did that”. The answer is never. It’s not an exercise class that you drag yourself into and then happily leave 60 minutes later patting yourself on the back. The doom scroll typically ends with some form of guilt, void, exhaustion, greed, judgement, insecurity, or sadness. Not to mention, people are now talking about scroll-apnea (the phenomenon of holding your breathe while scrolling)… great.
Let’s talk about the dark side of social media for a moment, specifically about comparison. As I talked through this with Scott one night, we came up with something I’ll call the collective comparison that happens on social media (and Instagram especially). Using myself for the example: as I scroll and consume the content from this app, I start to compare myself to the varying successes of Instagram users rather than any specific individual. I follow people who are really into cooking (the chefs), really into pilates (the athletic types), have successful businesses (the career-ers), have big families with gorgeous homes (the momfluencers), you get the idea. My eyes can easily differentiate between these accounts, but my brain consumes the collective information and starts to merge the individual successes from each of these accounts into one superhuman who somehow has it all. As if comparing myself to one person isn’t daunting and stressful enough, the athletic chef CEO mother who travels often and is stunningly beautiful with five children, a huge home, and 1000 supportive friends is simply impossible. I’m toast.