Sitting on the toilet and staring at my phone mindlessly — a continued pattern of replacing every quiet moment I have with content slop — I thought to myself, “What if I deleted my Instagram account? What would happen?”
A pang of fear hit me. I would lose all of the stories I’ve posted on my close friends. I would lose all of my mutuals, the primary method that people in my age group socialize now, and all the inspiring accounts I follow like @botoxqueen1968 and @azure4001. The thought seemed impossible.
But, I thought to myself again, what has Instagram truly brought me? Phone addiction? Reels made by parents who content farm their children as income? An anxiety disorder? A situationship?
So I deleted Instagram.
Not because of how much time I spend on it; I don’t care how much time I spend on screens. I’ve had an iPad in front of my face since I was maybe five years old. I deleted Instagram, the last frontier of the doomscrolling apps that I use, because I realized I would genuinely do nothing else with my life if I had it on my phone.
Social media — Instagram especially — has lowered the standards for everything: How we socialize and form relationships and, most crucially, how we spend our time.
Social media has destroyed my ability to be creative, something I used to devote all my free time to. I realized that the majority of my time is spent doing my work, socializing and sleeping, with my phone to fill all the gaps between these components of my life. None of my time goes to what I actually want to do, the things that give me purpose and actual fulfillment.
I like to think of myself as a creative person. But, why would I make a song, why would I read a book, why would I actually do an activity that has some kind of purpose or benefit, when I could scroll on the infinitely more stimulating Jungian horrorscape that is Instagram Reels?
More specifically, Instagram has warped, among many things, the process of being creative. When I tried to teach myself Ableton, I found myself slowly falling asleep. Thousand-yard staring into the distance of the PDF manual, and, eventually, I just went on my phone.
Instagram has a habit of displaying art as its final product, not as a process. The nature of being on social media is assembling an enormous smattering of the best work of thousands of different users, to make some huge collage of artistic endeavors that are simultaneously better than yours and completely effortless. With the crushing weight of displayed creativity, why would I endure the thankless process of writing a novel or composing an album, just for it to suck?
To me, it’s better to just post a cool digicam photo on my main story to a Snow Strippers song — because then I’d be guaranteed the immediate satisfaction of people liking my story. Ignorant of the fact that this cycle of gratification could inhibit me from ever making art again.
I ultimately realized this after trying and failing to manage my screentime. I would still find a way to doomscroll even if I didn’t have the apps on my phone. I tried deleting them and redownloading them only on certain days of the week and times of day. Didn’t work. I would scroll through X on my laptop. I started watching TikToks and Reels on my fucking iPad. I’m sure I’m not the only one like this … maybe.
This may seem like a personal example that only applies to my situation. You may think you can have a healthy relationship with social media, that it benefits you, that I am an anomaly for letting my phone consume my entire life. But social media is, to its core, inauthentic, and spending time on it thus prevents any semblance of authentic living.
Remember BeReal? Coined as “your daily dose of real life,” BeReal was an app where, at one random time every day, the user would have a 2-minute window to take a selfie of whatever it was they were doing at the moment. It could be any time of day, and missing a day would mean losing a streak.
Slowly, as BeReal’s user base grew, they added new features — most notably, you could take your BeReal outside of the two-minute window every day. This led to people staging their photos, retaking them, planning them, making a looming sense that our whole lives are performative.
Is that not really strange? Extending the panopticon of social media as far as the mundane of our lives? Showing those in our circles not just what we want them to see, but sacrificing our privacy for the sake of authenticity. This specific social media app allowed others to glimpse into our real lives, and then caused us to constantly perform for social media. Sure sounds authentic.
If my biggest hope in deleting social media was that I would be able to resuscitate my creative self, then my fear was that I would become a hermit. After all, I used to post on my stories constantly, having an Instagram would give people I meet a point of reference —“hey I know you, we’re mutuals!”— and expand my social life beyond people who are my close friends.
Is that what I want, though, to have a social life dictated by social media? What if — apparently a radical stance — everyone deleted social media and started putting effort into living again?
This goes for everything—stop doomscrolling. Go for a walk, watch a movie, draw a picture, write in your journal. Do something that requires you to actually improve and advance in some way, not just be a static figure floating through your daily routine.
Xavier Callan PO ’28 wants you to know that he is returning the package he ordered.
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