|
🎧 Play the Audio
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready…
|
This morning, I deleted Instagram from my phone. Shortly after waking up on the couch, I was about to open Instagram before getting in bed upstairs, but I deleted it.
I didn’t want to catch up on all the memes that have been DMed to me. I didn’t want to see the same group of accounts I follow and a timeline that’s not in chronological order — which makes it ironically called Timeline. I didn’t want to have to Unfollow more thirst-trap-only, eye-candy-only, someone I will never meet in person, or someone I will learn nothing constructive from accounts.
The time was 5:16 AM, and instead of opening the Instagram app, I held down the app icon until I saw a minus icon appear then deleted it. I don’t have a plan or pledge. I just know I don’t want to do Instagram right now. I don’t want to trade more time and attention to get so little back.
One of my oldest friends will send me a train load of memes and not even look at the ones that I sent them back. In fact, that same friend will go days without responding to text messages I sent to their phone when I want to talk about something.
Another friend will have serious conversations with me in Instagram DM‘s — the place where we share memes too — instead of texting my phone. That friend even told me once that they prefer to talk to me on Instagram. I’m not making this up. Fuckin bananas 🍌🍌😅
Here’s my raw and unpolished thoughts about this thing. I almost never feel better about my situation when I close Instagram. Most times I open it, I am bored, and/or I feel like shit. And I’m tired of seeing Instagram DM notifications because I know that they are memes and not personal messages. Yes, I could turn that off in my phone settings. When it’s time to close it, I almost always go back to feeling like shit after I’m briefly entertained by the app. I waste more time trying to find the accounts I follow that teach things like the physical therapists, the accounts that talk about history, the digital artists, and entrepreneurs. I can click away from the app for a few seconds, and the post I was looking at when I go back to the app changes. Literally, every time I open Instagram and there is something cool on the Feed screen, the Feed updates and moves that piece of content almost faster than I can put my finger on it to try to interact with it.
The people who built this app are too smart for that refresh to not be intentional. Consider that I have to now scroll and scroll and scroll past other posts and advertisements to try to find that post that seemed really really cool and that disappeared after .75 seconds. Chances are that I will find the post, but there’s also the chance that I am going to be entertained by some other posts on my way to finding that cool one. The manipulation is exhausting, and it’s a fucked up way to squeeze more time and attention out of me.
I’m done. For now. I’m not getting anything back from Instagram. Nothing.