I’ve had a lot of in-real-life conversations lately about my decision to stop using Instagram - and to sustain the break for an entire year - so I thought I’d collect some of those reflections here. Obviously, if you’re enjoying your time on IG or TikTok or any of the platforms and don’t feel the need to explore a break, that’s fantastic for you! No judgment from me, and what follows will probably read like a whole lot of hand-wringing over something that isn’t A Thing for you. But I’ve had enough conversations to know that it very much IS A Thing for many of us, so here we go…
The last time I sat on a sofa, put my feet up, and opened Instagram was January 2, 2024. We woke that morning in Paris of all places and took the train back to our rented flat in London later in the day. We’d been traveling since December 26 and I’d been using the ‘gram in concert with Google Maps, Open Table, CityMapper, and a variety of other apps to plan our adventures in London and Paris.
Instagram was a great tool for travel-planning, actually. I found that coffee shops and restaurants kept up their social profiles more accurately than their websites, and I’d benefitted enormously from travel influencers (and the algorithm that served them to me) who made really specific reels with titles like “How To See London At Christmas Like A Local (Beat The Crowds!).” Throughout our trip I’d been on the app a lot, popping in for a specific reason and then sticking around for the scroll.
Our trip wasn’t over but most of the research and reservations phase was behind me, and as I sat there on the sofa in the tiny front room of our flat at the beginning of a new year, I just felt, for lack of a better phrase, over it. That day I moved the app to an obscure folder on my phone to break the muscle-memory of mindlessly opening it, and thus began what is now a full year Instagram-free.
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It feels worth beginning this series with where I was in my social media use as a whole when I decided to quit Instagram cold turkey in January:
I have not used Facebook for personal enjoyment or social connection since late 2019. I help to manage/moderate a private group for my podcast The Mom Hour, I’m part of a Buy Nothing Project hyperlocal group, and I use Marketplace to browse secondhand furniture or list my own items to sell. When I need to, I go directly to these bookmarked pages on my laptop, do what I need to do, and get out. It works great for me.
I often joke that I sink into deep Twitter addiction when, and only when, there is an emerging weather disaster. I live in an area that experiences evacuation warnings due to flood risk, and I have found that a curated list of emergency management services and government agencies is the most efficient way to
make safe and sensible preparationsobsessively refresh ever-changing orders during a storm. I did recently deactivate my X account, however, so we’ll see how BlueSky serves my atmospheric-river-specific addiction tendencies this winter.Pinterest has never been for me. I look at it about three times a year, usually for haircut or home decor inspiration. I did spend some time cleaning out my Pinterest boards this year, thinking I may want to use it more intentionally, but clearly I’m missing the addictive subtype for this platform.
I do have a TikTok account but have never used it for entertainment. My 16-year-old maintains a delightful (truly) thread on our family group chat where he sends the funny and feel-good and all-ages-appropriate TikToks that cross his feed and every once in a while we airplay them to our TV and watch them as a family.
And then there’s Instagram. I was an early adopter and active user for over a decade, and the evolution of the platform coincided neatly with a) the birth and growth of my Very Photogenic Children and b) my entry into, and career growth within, the world of online content. I could always find a reason to spend time in the app, whether it was work-related or for personal pleasure.
A few years ago I fell out of the habit of posting or sharing on Instagram, gradually at first, and then completely. Where I had at one time been both a creator and a consumer on the app, I found myself in 100% consumption mode. I’ve thought way too much about why this is, and I think for me it came down to a few factors:
My kids got older and everything about putting them on my (public) profile felt weird: sometimes it felt like bragging, sometimes it felt like a violation of their privacy, sometimes it felt like too much information about them for some folks (like my podcast audience) and simultaneously not enough for the grandparents and family members who happened not to be on social media. And it never felt like it was telling the whole story.
The nature of my followers/audience got all up inside my head. I host a fairly popular parenting podcast, and on that show my co-host and I share some stories about our own families, but the show is mostly about the general experience of motherhood, not our specific kids. But because of the podcast, and my decision to have a public personal profile, I had a few thousand folks who were interested in my life beyond The Mom Hour, and I just couldn’t figure out how much of that I wanted to share. And then mixed in with the podcast audience followers, of course, were IRL friends and family from every phase of my life, many of whom I’d otherwise lost touch with and some of whom I had strained or superficial-at-best relationships with. I often imagined these “followers” as a large auditorium-full of folks I might want to connect with individually or in appropriately-organized groups, but to whom I had literally nothing that made sense to say collectively, from my perch on an imagined podium.
The news of the world and the responsibility of having a public online persona got weird. Or weird for me, at least. I sometimes had impulses to speak on a topic important to me but checked myself for virtue-signaling or feared some kind of backlash. I very often had impulses to share fluff and nonsense (cats and avocados, mostly) but checked myself for fear of being insensitive to the weightier issues du jour. I watched with interest as online content creators I admire navigated these challenges gracefully and in their own authentic ways, while I sort of opted out of the whole thing.
For me, sometime between 2020 and 2023 consuming Instagram content got easier (stories! reels! algorithm!) while using the platform for either creative output or real social connection got harder. And the consumption-only usage model became everything we read about nowadays: a numbing technique, a dopamine hit, an addiction, and a time-suck that never left me feeling better in the end.
In 2023 I took several breaks from Instagram, each lasting a month or so, and never experienced any breakthrough epiphanies or noticeable changes to my mental state. Each time I’d get back on the app I’d go back to the same consumption habits as before. Hitting pause was worthwhile, but it wasn’t paradigm shifting. I found myself wondering what changes I would notice if I quit altogether (or at least took a much more extended hiatus).
I honestly can’t remember if, when I tucked the app away in a hidden folder on January 2, I intended for it to be for a whole year. I think the idea came along more gradually, as weeks turned into months and started to notice how my phone usage, media consumption, friendship dynamics, and other qualities of modern life began to shift.
In Part 2 I share more about what I noticed in my habits and behaviors after a few months off of Instagram. You can read Part 2 here.
In Part 3 I write about the ‘social’ part of social media, and how my friendships have shifted in the year since I’ve been off the app. You can read Part 3 here.
I hope you’ll subscribe if you’re interested in hearing more from me!
If you’re thinking on this topic and want more interesting, thoughtful, shame-free perspectives, here are a few I’ve enjoyed:
Is there a sane way to use the Internet? (Ezra Klein on PJ Vogt’s Search Engine)
Tired? Distracted? Burned-Out? Listen To This. (The Ezra Klein Show)
Glennon’s Dramatic Social Media Plan with Amelia Hruby (We Can Do Hard Things)
We Deleted Instagram For 31 Days. Here’s What Happened… (I love all of
’s thoughtful writing on this topic, but this roundup of her community’s experience is a great entry-point)
SARAH! Omg, I could have written pretty much every word of this ESPECIALLY the part about IG being a blend of friends and family and also people in your audience. Oh and also the pressure to say just the right thing about every world event. I started resenting Insta so much, it made me physically ill. I was off there for almost all of 2024 and honestly, I didn’t miss it at ALL but I think that just reflects how OVER IT I was.
Thank you for sharing this series!
After 18 years, I removed the app from my phone on Dec.31. I’m 2 weeks in & feel far less noise in my mind & soul now. Never anticipated I’d do this. Now, it’s real life conversations, texts, meet ups, reading books, taking walks, news on actual websites & substack for me!