4 months and I'm gone
How I plan to mindfully de-couple from Instagram by the time I turn 36.
In the early days of Instagram I was pretty reluctant to join.
Not because it didn't sound like a fun place (all my friends were there), not because I didn't enjoy taking photos (I'm a millennial, c'mon), and not because I thought it would change how I interacted with the world (was “algorithm” part of the zeitgeist yet?).
I didn't want to join because I knew, I knew, I'd quickly become addicted.
I don't necessarily consider myself to have an addictive personality, but I'm self-aware enough to know that when I really like something I lean in. And Instagram sounded like a place/ platform/ app, that could easily become - not just an addiction - but a lens through which I would start viewing my whole life. I was tentative to voluntarily sign up for something I knew had the potential to be so consuming.
When I did reluctantly decide to join, after what I remember to be as some lite-to-mid level peer pressure, I decided it was going to be my vegan-cooking-photo-blog. This was February of 2013 (I scrolled back to check), and I was ready to share my romps through veganism and express just how delicious it could be, even for a youthful 23 year old.
At the time I had just moved to Bedstuy with my then boyfriend, had just found the yoga studio that would quickly become my third place (RIP Sacred Brooklyn), and I was exploring what post-college adulting was looking like as a young designer in the inarguably most inspiring and creative city in the world.
Instagram would just be an extension of this exploration, and similar to Live Journal, Myspace, and Facebook it would be a fun way to document my favorite moments and inner conversations.
And so, soon after downloading this little camera icon to my phone I was sharing my yoga journey pretty much daily (yes, I was one of those girls), I was snapping artistic shots of my latest juice combo, and I was posting every possible pic of my new pup who we'd just rescued.
Addicted I quickly became…
Fast forward to 2025
We're all well aware of how IG grew from it’s innocent infancy in 2010 to it’s monstrous devouring of our creative and entrepreneurial culture by 2025. This feisty fifteen year old is unabashed in their ambition to consume our attention, our time, and our mental health.
For that reason, and many, many more, I've decided it's time.
(re: you are what you commit yourself to, and I'm not interested in committing myself to this destructive platform anymore)
Mark Zuckerberg has flipped the switch, turned the lights on, and the party is officially over – for me at least.
As jarring as this reality is, there's still a lot of space IG takes up in my mind, my time, and honestly my heart. So leaving the platform really isn't as easy as it sounds.
What do people say? It's super easy to get married, but it's extremely hard to get divorced?
Yeah…
(Dis)enchantment with the medium
Marshall McLuhan was the philosopher who coined the iconic term, “the medium is the message”. Although somewhat cryptic and mysterious, I've learned what he meant with the statement was – whatever technology is delivering the information, it's the technology, not the information, that's actually providing the perspective with which we interpret and absorb the information.
If Instagram was the medium, and my life was the message, the IG lens was what I began quickly absorbing my life through.
I catch myself cropping moments of my experiences through the lens of stories posts and aesthetic photo adjustments for the feed. I sometimes think about future activities or adventures and drift off in my imagination for how to productively reconstruct these moments to fit content themes for my profile. I use it as a lens for my creative expression, yes, but it's also the lens through which I see my life way too often.
I despise that this mental viewfinder is now so engrained in me, but as Marshall would argue – it's par for the course. He was talking about the advent of television, and how with moving imagery being readily available for households, more and more people were perceiving their lives like movies and tv shows in a box.
60 years later, we're viewing our lives through even smaller boxes. And at times I can feel my brain shrinking around the limitation.
But even as I write this, I also remember how much I've come to love the character limitation for captions, and having to adhere to the dimensions of the reels and carousels. I'm a person who thrives with parameters, and as much as I often feel like I'm confining and reducing myself, I also feel secure in the fact that I can only create within these boundaries. Parts of me feel comfortable in these cozy boxes.
Stepping into a new creative medium, whether that be fully energizing my newsletter or Substack or podcast means I'll have to really reimagine the parameters of my expression.
Will I incude photos?
How will I translate the urge to create educational carousels?
Will I ever video record anything again?
As exciting as exploring a new medium sounds, it's also daunting because of its newness. I've specifically conditioned myself to be able to create a post on IG without having to think too hard about it. Starting over in a new space requires a stretching of my creative edges and a redefining of the boundaries by myself – they won't be dictated to me by a platform. Which also means, at least in my mind, there's more room for potential misinterpretation, judgment, or dissatisfaction as what I create is interpreted by others.
It's all at once liberating and anxiety inducing.
12 years of my life has been devoted to this space.
Twelve years is nothing to scoff at. The longest I've ever lived in one home was six-ish years. The longest romantic relationship I've ever been in is five and half. Experts have said that if you have a friendship that lasts longer than seven years it'll last for life.
Twelve years spent connecting with friends and family, building community, sharing and contextualizing my inner thoughts, and artistically communicating my ideas, my businesses, my life – I built a home on this platform.
The last remnants of my yoga studio still exist on our defunct page. The memories of all my adult vacations have been catalogued. The carousel of the night we closed on the house, the photos of my pup while she was last in my custody before my ex took ownership of her, a myriad of romantic dates and special dinners and favorite shared experiences – so many of them are in this one place.
People still talk about social media like it's this superfluous waste of time, but it really is another community center. It's a personal museum of joy that we get to invite people into. It's a place for connection and growth and education and hope. Yes I know, it's not these things for everyone, but I always say what you get out of something is what you put into it, and I put so much of myself into it.
As much as social media divides us it also connects us to the edges of the earth we've never been to. To ideas and people and things we'd never see if we stayed solely in our physical neighborhoods. Sure there's a highly sophisticated algo keeping us rotating in a hamster-wheel like vacuum, but at the same time - you can find anything and anyone and any topic you're curious about on these platforms. It's truly aw inspiring when you take the capitalism out of it.
But that's just it - that's the problem. I'm not the kind of person who can separate the art from the artist. For example, I used to love Woody Allen films when I was younger – Hannah and Her Sisters was a personal favorite, and my mom and I used to watch over and over again. As an adult, however, learning the full horrid story of Allen made it so I don't even consider his films entertainment – they're just painful reminders of this terrible human who ruined lives of innocent people around him and is still getting away with it.
As soon as I know too much, I can't turn back. I can no longer pretend to appreciate a space, a person, a piece of art when I know how much of it is toxic or born from toxicity. And if for some reason my head does turn, I can feel my skin crawl in reaction, and a part of me hates that I was suckered back somehow. Blech, not what I want for myself.
In this context, how would IG be any different?
I'm not leaving without a plan
In the initial phase of this transition, it became very clear to me that leaving this platform would involve a process of release and even grief. Sure I could just delete the app from my phone and pretend like everything was fine, but that would be doing a great disservice to all the energy I devoted to this space, to all the connections I've made from this platform, and to my creative energy.
There would be a hole that would be made, and if I didn't get clear about how to fill that hole, and fast, my goal of divesting would fail.
So first things first, I've identified the main things IG provides for me:
community & connection
creative expression & inspiration
education & support
Having outlined these as the key things I could potentially lose (or have less of) in my journey to an IG-free life, I can now create a plan for how to fill those voids, and take constructive action towards making my goal real by my desired achievement date (7/9/25).
From this list, I've gotten clear about the platforms I plan to divert most of my energy to:
Substack (creative expression, community connection, support)
Newsletter (separate from substack for community connection)
Podcast (creative expression and education)
Pinterest (inspiration, support)
Hand-made art projects like knitting, painting, crafting, cooking
My real life communities like yoga studios, friend groups, volunteer organizations, etc.
Other ways I plan to support myself in this transition:
reading articles like this one about post-IG living
slowly migrating my creative impulse towards the platforms listed above
gradually reducing my digital use in general
letting my community know where we can continue our online convos
And to be honest, that's as far as I've gotten. Part of me is sharing this goal to hold myself accountable to actually doing it, because there's still very much another part of me that's not ready to let go.
But I'm choosing, very consciously, to turn up the volume on the voice that's been screaming inside me saying, “It's time – we really gotta get outta here.”
My plan is to share 3 more updates - one for each month as I navigate this transition slowly, mindfully, and with as much grace as possible. So… stay tuned for more.
Addictive personality or not
My 23 year old self really was onto something when she instinctually knew a platform was going to become an addiction. Had I listened to her, who knows what would have happened, or not happened, in my life – I can trace many of my opportunities, friendships, and learning experiences back to Instagram.
But nothing can last forever, and all things must evolve at some point.
In astrology 12 years is a whole Jupiter cycle to travel around the entire zodiacal wheel. The number 12 is also central to most of our organizing of time (5 increments of 12 seconds in every minute and minutes in every hour, 2 increments of 12 hours in a day, 12 months in a year). It feels like a numerologically (real word?) supported choice – like an opportunity to round out a full cycle of engagement.
I see this decision as an entry way into stretching my creative edges as an artist, designer, and human - to step outside the 1080x1350 box and to find new limits of my expression, my community, my connection, my education. In my heart, these are limits I very much want to define for myself.
And hopefully this new journey will be a different kind of addictive – not in a psychologically manipulative, dopamine spiking kind of way. In a joyful, fulfilling, soul-satiating kind of way.
If you're also in the midst of transitioning out of the Meta-verse, I'd love to hear about your experience. We can create a new post-Zuckerberg world if we really want to – and we can do it together.
More on my transition soon.
I saw your carrosel on IG and had to run in here to tell you how EXCITED I am for this journey! And i love that you have a plan for it. In 2021 I went off insta for a whole year and it was such a beautiful exercise of truly remembering what was in there in the first place. Excited to follow the journey love!