Bye, Bye, Bye Instagram
Yesterday, I decided to disengage from my final social media outlet (Instagram). Social media has been a major presence in my life since around 2005 when Facebook and Myspace started redefining how I interacted with the world, and how I interacted with myself and my own sense of self-importance. A little more than a decade later, I started seriously reflecting on the damages social media was doing to my behavior, my endeavors, and my outlook. After that reflection, I decided on December 27th, 2017 that I was done. I deleted Facebook, and left the social media party for greener pastures.
Mostly, that decision proved to be a remarkable success. A few years later, though, the seed was planted in my brain that there was perhaps a more responsible way for me to partake of social media, that perhaps I could reengage in a healthier way, combined with more reasonable expectations of what I might get from that path. And so I reemerged on Instagram –apparently deeming it a healthier, sleeker, and more pure outlet than its Meta-owned brother, Facebook. The attention that social media promised ate at my lonely relationship with my work. I was left with the conundrum that we in the 21st century are left to grapple with: If I don’t use social media, do I even exist?
That phrasing sounds jokey, but moving away from the convenience social media provides is to risk real isolation. When you cease being available by the most accessible/prevalent means of the era, you are, in many ways, forgotten. The number of people who reach into the realm of the inconvenient to hold onto you are few. And now, here in 2023 as I walk away from Instagram and my last social media network, I feel these familiar feelings of modest dread, believing that three months from now, with no “likes” to be had, no public means in which to feel fulfilled, and little way of spreading the things I am working on (and excited to share), will my vanity make me ache for the social media void?
Maybe. But there comes a time when you evaluate for yourself what are the healthiest decisions for your life. There is a price to be paid to ditch social platforms, but I think those feelings ultimately pale in comparison to the feelings of disingenuousness I feel every time I log into one of these websites and partake of their mind-numbing buffet of vapid nonsense. I feel the damage happening in real time.
Which doesn’t mean it is this way for everyone, but it is undoubtedly this way for me. Social media has often brought out the less attractive tendencies of mine, or at least given those tendencies a place to be amplified: My self-centeredness, my need for external validation, and, even paradoxically, my need to self-deprecate. In short, I don’t like who I am on social media; I don’t like the urges that it tugs at; I don’t like what it does to my brain, my attitude, my emotions, and my time.
I desire to learn both to reach people in non-digital ways, and also to become less dependent on others to give me the validation I evidently crave so much. My brain knows social media is toxic (at the very least to me), but yet the flimsy promises of social media (RE: attention) continue to call. Sounds like addiction to me.
I hope I am a better person without it.