Edition #166: Lessons From A Year Off Instagram
BYOA: Be Your Own Algorithm. Plus, shop like a collector not a buyer, why members-only clubs are everywhere, and Kristen Wiig in all her glory.
A Note From the Editor
If you’ve been reading along with this newsletter for the past year you already know how this went down, but if you haven’t, here’s what prompted me to delete Instagram off my phone—I was drunk. It was January of 2023, I had just had a magical evening surrounded by friends in Costa Rica. When I got home and scrolled, the buzz of the evening's magic was dimmed after watching a local influencer's night on Stories. I deleted the app from my phone that very night without much thought, and I haven’t formally revisited it since.
Though of course, there's more to it than that. Exiting Instagram was the cumulative effect of my stubbornness, my insecurities, my principles, and most importantly, my desire to live in a way that isn’t passive—i.e. I have to do this because everyone does this. Like giving up dairy despite my love for cheese when I realized it had been making me feel horribly ill for the first 25 years of my life, giving up Instagram made intuitive sense when I took a moment to consider it. I didn’t like what it was doing to me, nor did I like what it was doing to our brains and our consumption habits. If it happened at first out of a drunken impulse, I kept at it as a small act of rebellion.
What have I done with all the precious time I didn’t spend scrolling? Good question. I have no novel manuscript sitting on my desk (nor do I have a desk at the moment). I have not learned to be fluent in Spanish, nor have I become a competent pastry chef. I have, however, lived in a way that a majority of you probably have not and maybe never will—and when you electively detach from a major societal driver for a prolonged period of time, you learn a few things.
The Unexpected Ego Stroke
Though this thought was nowhere in my mind when I deleted Instagram that fateful night, it turns out that being off the app is a flex. As I’ve traveled and dated and met new people over the past 1.5 years, being off Instagram would eventually come up. Or Instagram would come up and I would have to disclose I wasn’t on it right now. Upon this disclosure, I was often met with incredulity followed by something like admiration. Being off Instagram is a little bit mysterious, a little bit sexy, a little bit baffling.
I once went on a date with a director who, unbeknownst ot me at the time, had directed a major motion picture. When I learned he wasn't on Instagram, a portal of possibility opened in my mind. You could be a successful, working creative and not be on Instagram? This was news to me. I imagine those new people I meet are equally confused when I say I'm a writer off Instagram.
I Forgot That You Existed
You can’t begin the comprehend the amount of space random people take up in your brain until you remove the slivers of their digitally shared life from your peripheral vision. You know that person you met at a group dinner once who followed you on Instagram and you didn’t want to be an asshole so you followed back? That fitness instructor you had a crush on a decade ago? That girl you have absolutely no recollection of ever meeting or following but whose life you know about in freakish detail? Without Instagram, they all cease to exist.
I don’t see this as a net loss. The cleared space makes way for other people to arrive in your life in real life. Also, you break yourself of the habit of checking out a person’s Instagram profile right after you meet them—the digital seizing up, making assumptions about someone’s life after a 10-second scroll.
I Did Not Cease To Exist
My brainy college boyfriend once told me about a quantum physics theory claiming nothing exists until it is observed. Everyone who is *on* Instagram or TikTok knows this theory to be true. We only exist in the modern world if we have a digital presence, right?
Actually, wrong. I feared without Instagram stories of me flipping pancakes, walking through Washington Square Park, or sharing snippets of this newsletter, I would cease to exist. Disappear into oblivion, become irrelevant. Maybe I did and I just didn’t notice. I’m sure all the people I forgot existed also forgot I exist. But as it turns out, it doesn’t matter to me whether my loose ties are constantly thinking of me. The truth is that most of us are wholly irrelevant to our loose ties anyway, Instagram just conditions us to feel a false sense of relevance. It's why we find ourselves in the "everyone's an influencer" culture.
I will caveat that I’m not entirely sure whether I’ve missed out on potential work by being off Instagram, another fear I held. But then, I’m not sure how much work I got off Instagram in the first place, for I am not and will never be a social media influencer in any traditional sense—per my most recent human design reading, my persona does not have a strong influential pull on social media. A relief to hear!
My Close Relationships Deepened
When you can no longer passively consume or share important parts of your life, you must switch over to actively doing so. It was a difficult habit to muster at first. I had to constantly remind my friends they needed to tell me the big stuff personally lest I miss it. I also had to actively share the things I was proud of with the people I loved. When I went somewhere really cool, made a film, discovered a cool shot of myself surfing that someone took from the shore, I had to directly solicit the attention and praise I wanted.
In doing so, the effect on my close relationships has been net positive. When something good happens, my first instinct is to share it with people I care about, not with a bunch of random people who are scrolling through my life to decompress from theirs.
New Connections Didn’t Always Have a Chance to Bud
I’ve noticed it more now that I’m off Instagram, the way people of a certain age and social set ask to connect on Instagram after meeting for the first time. I get it, for Instagram is a nice, low-stakes way to stay in touch. Being off the app, I must deny these new friends/contacts/strangers with potential of that passive digital tether to my life, offering instead my WhatsApp number. It isn’t the same, and some of these potential connections fizzle out before they even have a chance to begin.
A loss, perhaps, but I frame it as having more time and space to spend on people who already matter to me. And if I find someone I am sincerely interested in, I am not above making an effort to connect via the most superior means of digital communication: voice notes. A new connection can be established and solidified via voice note, trust me.
Processing Real Life Without Wondering How You’ll Frame It Is Bliss
You’re doing something big—attending a group trip, going on a safari, working on a cool project—and whilst experiencing the thing, you’re also capturing content that will later be shared via Instagram Stories. Somewhere behind your conscious mind, you are figuring out how you’ll digitally frame this experience. There is a pressure, ever so slight, affecting the way you are experiencing this thing in real-time.
It’s not impeding, but it is there. You only notice it when it is no longer there. At least that’s how it was for me. I love not having to think about how or what I'll post as I am experiencing something cool. It relieves pressure, always a plus for my over-active mind, and allows me to be more present in the moment.
Having Photos Of Yourself Is Kind of Nice
I have a dear friend who takes the best photos of me. I like hers because they are typically candid or not overly posed and I always look happy in them. While doing my typical scroll through my photos while sitting on an airplane tarmac recently, I realized I don’t have as many photos of myself these days. It might just be because I haven’t been consistently living near this particular friend lately, or maybe it’s because I’ve been relieved of the pressure to snap adequate photos for the grid.
Content Consumed Outside the Algorithmic Prison Is Objectively More Interesting
We can all agree that shit things are happening in the world right now and have been for, what, the past four years or so? Horrible things, one on top of the next. I know about these things, they impact me, but they do not ruin my day or my life as consistently as they used to.
I remember grabbing coffee with a friend a few months ago. She was on the verge of tears when I arrived, bursting at the seams on account of a horror she’d been ensconced in all day via Instagram. The algorithm hooked her, reeled her in, and gutted her right there in her own living room—all in the name of getting her to spend more time on the platform. More time spent equals more time to advertise. This isn’t conspiratorial, it's how the platforms were designed to work. As the old saying goes, if you're not paying for the product, you are the product.
Outside of not being served more horror stories than my human brain can process daily, it’s been a wonder to have more of a active choice in the content I consume. Substack is good for that—I read a handful of newsletters that curate interesting reads and that keep me as dialed into the cultural conversation as I need to be. I even read physical newspapers sometimes—great fun, so excessive. Highly recommend!
I read more poetry, watch more mini-series and more movies. I forgo content for chunks at a time, taking in only what my eye can see—a book in my hand, leaves on a tree, people passing by. I am a better algorithm than *the algorithm* because I know how things make me feel and I am not trying to sell myself a sweater. Try it out for a few days. BYOA: Be Your Own Algorithm.
Facebook Is a Low Stakes Way to Scratch The Itch
I never said I was a hero. A year and change later, I’ll admit I’ve popped into the Museum of Oddities that is Facebook here and there. Facebook is where you go to see photos from your friend’s mother’s fourth cruise of the year. By that I mean, Facebook is full of low-stakes updates that aren’t trying to inflate their significance, and there is a relief in that. Nobody is posturing. This is prom dress shopping at Macy’s, this is Panera Bread, this is walking your dog through the neighborhood in Ugg slippers.
I’ve grown fond of Facebook—not only for the Groups functionality, which I will scream to high heavens is one of the most functional social media tools out there—but also for its negligible side effects on my mental well-being. Shout out to the Instagram friends who also share their stories on Facebook. It’s nice to see a shiny, curated object every so often amidst the baby photos, the engagement photos, and the Halloween decoration photos.
After a year and five months, I’m toying with the idea of re-entering the Instagram arena. It was never meant to be forever, and being halfway around the world by myself makes a passive digital tether sound pretty nice right about now. Also, I’ve got some sick photos from my safari to share. Only time will tell.
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Cheers, my dears, and as always, thanks for reading. I have no plans this weekend which I am delighted about, for I spent last weekend deep in the bush on my first safari. I saw leopards having lots of sex. I saw a cheetah try to kill some antelope. I saw elephants using their trunks as water guns. I saw nearly every species introduced to me in The Lion King, and I saw a graveyard of animal bones.
I ate three-course dinners and exorbitant breakfasts, lots of red meat and freshly baked croissants. I swam in a freezing cold pool, woke up at 5:30 each morning and had no reception for days. An 80-year-old woman told me I should have at least four children over gin and tonics during our nightly sundowner. She also gave me her number and invited over for dinner the next time I find myself in Philadelphia. See you there, Joanna.
Have a wonderful weekend. Order a cortado at a coffee shop, buy a giant bouquet of flowers, submerge your body in water. Until next time.
Three Pieces of Content Worth Consuming
Shop Like a Collector, Not a Buyer. I love clothes, but I’m also a chronic over-thinker who is no good at doing things a little at a time. For that reason, I tend to avoid reading advice about curating the perfect wardrobe because the end result is often the urge to throw away everything I own and start fresh. This article did not give me that feeling. The approach is brilliant and am going to attempt to follow it moving forward. On the subject of fashion, I saw these and gasped. A beautiful shoe and a nice piece of jewelry will always do it for me.
Why Members-Only Clubs Are Everywhere Right Now. A cultural tide is turning—I felt it in New York, I feel it in Cape Town. The people are thirsty for togetherness. I could wax poetic about how we got here all day (and all the opportunities created by our collective need for connection), but I’ll let you read
’s GQ feature instead. This is a very specific, very high-brow New York version of meeting the need, but the fact that rich people and wanna-be rich people are slinging out big money for a sense of manufactured togetherness is proof that Americans are all a little bit lonely. Also, the details of this story are juicy juicy juicy.A Filmmaker Needed A Quiet Place to Write. Where Better Than a Tuscan Villa? If that headline weren’t enough to get me, the gorgeous photos in this piece were. This is one of those times you read about someone’s life and think, wait, what? How on God’s green Earth can one’s existence be so effortlessly glamorous?
Perhaps You Should…Watch Kristen Wiig In All Her Glory
Palm Royale is worth the $10 it’ll cost you to subscribe to Apple TV for the month to watch it. I didn’t need much convincing—Kristen Wiig as an outsider attempting to infiltrate high society? The styling? Please, take my money.
This show has one of the best pilot episodes I’ve seen in a long time. It’s got Ricky Martin, whom I didn’t recognize until halfway through. It’s got Laura Dern playing a very non-Laura Dern character. The show escalates to a point of ridiculousness, ending as something very different than what it started as, and I liked that! This feels like pushing the envelope of what TV can do, how experimental and absurd you can get while still playing in the sandbox of a star-studded cast on major streaming platform. Please watch, and tell me your thoughts if and when you do.
**Bonus Content** (A Very Humble Apartment Tour)
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One of the fun things about being a little less online is that occasionally, as in the case of Julia Fox’s apartment tour, you discover things a full calendar year after they’ve gone viral. I still haven’t read her memoir but after watching this video I’m going to.
Also, I want to be eating this dessert all summer, my version of the MET Gala always delivers, nothing to see here, and omg I CANNOT WAIT!!!
A Quote From A Book You Should Read:
What matters most to me, is that I know how I feel, and the rest of the world might catch up one day, even if it’ll be a quiet revolution over longer than my lifetime, if it happens at all.
-Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo