Life outside the algorithm.

Thoughts on my month off Instagram.

Last July, I wrote a piece about my negative feelings towards Instagram. You can read it here. In the following months, I continued in this one-sided, love-hate relationship, convincing myself I couldn’t live without it. It’s funny because if Instagram was a man my friend was dating I would tell her to immediately dump his ass. But like any toxic relationship, it’s hard to fully break ties when you feel like it might get better. Plot twist: it doesn’t.

So, on NYE when my friend asked if I’d join her for a month-long break from social media, I agreed. And I did it. I took a whole month off Instagram. A Dry Digital January, if you will. (*insert fanfare as another struggling millennial completes an extended ‘digital detox’.) This shouldn’t really be cause for celebration, but as a self-proclaimed Instagram addict, it feels like a pretty big deal.

I know, I know, it seems like everyone hates Instagram these days and is ditching it (or at least thinking about ditching it) in favour of a more analogue, AI-slop-free existence, and despite my fundamental human need to be unique, I’m not. I fucking hate it too.

At the risk of sounding like a cringe millennial desperate to keep up with the times, I miss the old days of Instagram. Following your friends and actually seeing their posts rather than getting sucked into hours and hours of meaningless drivel in the form of 10-second reels, their only intention to piss you off, make you feel inadequate or encourage you to subscribe to their OnlyFans. And don’t even get me started on the ads (apparently you actually have to pay now to opt out of ads??? What in the Black Mirror is that about, Zuck?)

Instagram has become an accidental Frankenstein-esque monster. What started as a way to share photos and connect with friends has evolved into this terrifying void of consumerism and comparison that sucks the joy and soul out of its users. A parasitic vampire hell-bent on division, its algorithm carefully designed to prioritise polarising, radicalised content; Instagram has turned into a Neo-Nazis wet dream. Except I don’t think it was accidental at all.

Photo by Gaspar Uhas on Unsplash

Did you know, there are only two industries that call their customers users? The illegal drug trade and tech companies. Both industries aim to create a product that fosters addiction and dependency. Why? Because it makes them more money.

So no, I don’t think it’s some random coincidence that Instagram is so damn addictive, making it feel impossible for us to imagine a life without it. But here’s what happened when I went ‘cold turkey’ in January.

I realised it is entirely possible to live a happy life without it. I didn’t die from not seeing the latest celebrity meme or watching a thousand reels with the same fucking trending audio. The world didn’t stop turning, bad things didn’t get worse and people didn’t suddenly forget about me (if anything, my friends actually checked in with me more). I didn’t miss it, like, at all.

I also learnt that I really value my privacy. In previous years, I have shared every part of my life on social media with the reckless abandon of a teenager without a fully developed frontal lobe. I now look back and cringe at the way I gave that away for free. And for what? A few likes? To feel seen, validated in my joy or misery? To be relatable? I understand that our desire for relatability is essentially just our deep-seated human need for connection and belonging, but in an increasingly curated world it seems we are contorting ourselves for the algorithm in the name of authenticity.

We have become obsessed with being our most authentic selves which can lead to a kind of performative vulnerability. There was nothing that pissed me off more than seeing an Instagram post from some fitfluencer with hundreds of thousands of followers trying to be relatable by saying they ‘haven’t been to the gym in ages and ate pizza for dinner’. When in reality they went to the gym 3 days ago and the pizza was made with a fucking cauliflower crust. It’s disingenuous and boring.

At the risk of this becoming a polemic written by a bitter, grumpy old man, I also became sick of the same, unoriginal content being churned out faster than £1 Shein tops. I am not exempt from this criticism. More and more I was feeling like I didn’t really have anything new to add to the conversation in the spaces I was in, but I made the content anyway. Feeding the algorithm what it wanted to stay relevant and hiding behind the idea that I was helping others. But was I really? Did I actually make a difference? I genuinely don’t know the answer, I’m just thinking out loud. Please don’t mistake this for a woe-is-me, I have no value, self-deprecation rant. What I mean is, do we really need so many similar voices all saying the same thing, screaming louder and louder into the void in a bid to be heard? As a white woman, I’m not sure my input is always vital to a cause.

Even writing these thoughts down is a bit scary because, in all honesty, I fear Instagram has become an increasingly volatile place with zero understanding of nuance. Have you heard of The Bean Soup Theory? It essentially describes the weirdness we’re seeing on social media where people need to make everything about themselves and expect every piece of content to cater to them; a ‘what-about-me’ effect. It started with someone posting a recipe video on TikTok for a bean soup and then turned into a whole thing because numerous commenters were asking for substitutions for, you guessed it, beans. In a fucking bean soup. A perfect example of, you can’t please everyone. In a similar way, Instagram has become a platform of tone-policing and self-censoring through fear of ‘getting it wrong’. What if I offend this group or that person or forget about their suffering? I became scared of the height looking down from the pedestal I had a hand in creating for myself.

Anyone who knows me, actually knows me, will know I am a fairly outspoken and opinionated woman. I stand up for what I believe in and speak up when I see something that is wrong. It has made me very unpopular at parties and with men, which, honestly, I see as a bonus. But even as someone who is not shy to say what I think (I’m autistic), I have become reluctant to share my unfiltered thoughts at times. Instead, I would spend a painstaking amount of time drafting, checking and caveating what I wanted to say until it morphed into an unrecognisable version of my initial thoughts. It felt like I ended up saying nothing because it became so diluted and I don’t want to dilute myself.

In a recent therapy session, we uncovered that a lot of these anxieties online came from my desire to be seen as a Good Person. I am terrified that someone may read something I write or perceive one of my choices as Bad and therefore label me as Bad. But I don’t think any one person is completely Good or Bad despite what my autistic brain and structured thinking has a preference for. So, what does it matter if a random stranger on the internet thinks I’m Bad? I know I’m a good person and the people that know me know I’m a good person. I think that’s what really matters.

My time offline has reminded me of the fact that we don’t need to be perfect. In fact, perfect is fucking boring. If you’re perfect, everyone likes you and looks up to you and you never make mistakes. But without making mistakes, you don’t learn and when we stop learning, we stop growing. If everyone looks up to you, you end up very lonely on that pedestal with a long way to fall. And if everyone likes you, it means you’re not saying anything that will rock the boat, which probably means you’re not saying much of anything at all. I don’t want that. I want to be messy. I want to make mistakes and rock the boat and grow from my fuck ups. I want old people to raise their eyebrows when I say something outlandish like ‘we should care about other people’.

I still haven’t returned to Instagram even though we’re now three weeks into February. I haven’t decided how (or even if) I want to return and in what capacity. All I know is I can’t go back to what I was doing before. That would be the definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.