It’s been great!

About 6 months ago, I deleted Instagram from my phone. I noticed I had been spending way, way too much time on the app. When I woke up, I would watch reels. When I ate lunch, I would scroll through the search page. When I went to bed, I would watch other people’s stories to learn how their life was better/more interesting/unique and how they were more happy/popular/intimate/successful than me.

And I would have to post the best parts of my life to compete. I can’t look like I’m boring!

But that’s not how life works. People have good days and bad days, and comparing yourself only to the crème de la crème of other, random (or not) people’s lives isn’t healthy. Along with that, reels would waste away my time and productivity. I would open the search page by muscle memory and start watching the dumbest videos known to man. They would be angry, sad, funny, racist, cute, but most of all it was just entertainment. Whether I found them awful or not, scrolling away and experiencing these flashes of emotion are like entertainment, that would keep me scrolling for more and feeling awful once I left.

That was, if I could leave anyway. Whenever I came across a bad reel, something that would make me angry, or something extremely mean to a group of people for no apparent reason, the natural instict would be to get away. And the easiest way to get away, and the motion you’ve been doing for the last two hours, is scrolling to the next one. It’s clever, because it lets you escape from what you saw, and keeps you on the loop of seeing more. It would be a miracle for me to press the back button on my phone. And if I did, I had to hope I wouldn’t open Instagram right back up once I was on my homepage.

All of this, plus many more things, like the constant tracking and ad serving Instagram and Facebook would do, made me delete Instagram. At first, I was scared that I would feel alone. I wouldn’t be connected to my friends, and I would miss out on the group chats I was a part of. But, the opposite happened. Months after deleting Instagram now, I know who really matters to me. My true friends, who I talk to and catch up with, and the randoms from school that I had a class with who would just leave me feeling worse about myself. I didn’t lose any connection, the only thing I lost was wasting my time with people that didn’t matter to me at all.

I was never really on the train of “record everything that happens to you” (I’ve always, maybe unreasonably thought, that if you’re filming anything vertically than it probably doesn’t matter.) But the moments in my life feel a lot more special now that I don’t need to share it with the people I see in the hallway sometimes. And I absolutely encourage you to record things for yourself. Just don’t let your phone take you away from the beautiful moments in your life.


A person recording a Grandson concert using the camera on their Nintendo DS.

Shoutout to this person filming a Grandson concert with their DS.


And now, the hypocrisy.

“But why are you writing a blog??!”

I think blogs are a much more healthy way to share things online! There isn’t the pressure of social media interaction, there’s the universal understanding that we’re trying to share cool things that the internet would be interested in. It doesn’t contain the addictiveness or self-hatred of social media, it’s just a place for us to put our thoughts and for the people who would be interested in hearing them to tune in. I’ve been discovering a bunch of blogs to add to my RSS feed app (I personally reccomend Feeder), and here are some of my favourites:

time spent offline by Mehret Biruk

Parkzer by Adam Parkzer

xkcd by Randall Munroe (technically not a blog, but I like the comics)

Anyways, I would highly reccomend if you’re looking to quit social media, to do so. If you’re still debating it, I would reccomend making a list of pros and cons, and see if you really need it. And, if the current momentum of deleting social media becomes trendy, you get the right of saying “I did it first!”

Thanks for reading my first blog post.