Delete Your Instagram
Reap the benefits, suffer the consequences
Want to know how to tell if someone has read a book that a movie is based on? They’ll tell you.
I quit Instagram this year. And like the book-movie people, I must tell you about it. Well, truthfully, I mostly quit. I’ve logged in twice: once to message a D-list celebrity who owed me money and wasn’t responding to my Grailed messages and once more to post that I moved to Mexico City so my “friends” would know.
I’ve been battling with my Instagram usage for years – never having the app on my phone, but always checking in the web (a perfectly shit experience to not suck you in, but good enough to know who got engaged). Earlier this year, I decided to quit cold cool turkey.
There are some boring specifics of how I got here (some credit to this and subsequently this) and just how bad my phone addiction is (perhaps not that bad, but definitely not that important). These particulars are irrelevant as long as it was true that I was unhappy with my relationship with my phone. Was my phone serving me? Or was I serving my phone? When the answer was increasingly the latter, I decided to take action with the lowest hanging fruit.
”Your life is what you pay attention to. If you want to spend it on video games or Twitter, that’s your business. But it should be a conscious choice.”
—Catherine Price, How to Break Up With Your Phone
Ten months later, here are some unsolicited thoughts on what I think was a net-positive move:
Daily Instagram usage is way too much, no matter who you are.
Okay, if you’re making a meaningful wage by being on Instagram, perhaps I should shut up and let you keep doing your thing. However, I am encouraging your audience to log off. Sorry about that.People who don’t even have Instagram accounts are cool / hot.
This is straight from my brain, not research. But to boost my POV, I Googled “not having instagram is attractive gen z” and returned zero relevant headlines. Then I removed the “gen z” appendage and this was the top result: Why are people with no social media so damn hot? See?Supplanting IG scrolling with more fulfilling media consumption is an instant improvement.
Every week or two, we recommend enough long-form content here to replace two days of scrolling. Get yourself a great read-later app (I recommend Matter) and start reading more long-form content on the toilet.People who comment on celebrity IGs are so incredibly bizarre.
Embarrassingly, one of my exes does this. This was obvious when I had an Instagram, I just haven’t really had the forum to express publicly before how odd this is. I get why big accounts do it (free real estate for our tiny brains to click and hopefully follow), but why do normal people do this?You will miss important life moments of people whose lives you are interested in.
My friend got engaged and married this year and I had no idea! Small, courthouse wedding. It’s possible she thinks I’m a bad friend for not having reached out, though I could make the case she’s the bad friend for not texting me directly. Third option: we’re not that good of friends and this was a good leveling actually closer to the next point.You will miss unimportant life moments, meals, and baby pictures from people whose lives you simply could/should not care less about.
Okay, the now-married friend does not count for this one, but most of the people I follow on IG do. That Carbone spicy rigatoni sure looks like Carbone spicy rigatoni, friend!You will be very out of the loop on pop culture.
This is good, I think. But then again, I just learned that Rick Rubin watches 11 hours of WWE wrestling per week(!!), so wtf do I know? Though, if this (or any content vertical) is important to you, there are plenty of ways to consume that content off of Instagram.Most restaurants are most-accessible by Instagram
Not to mention, their profiles are updated more regularly than Google or their website. If I had Instagram, perhaps I would have seen that Ursula was closed Christmas week last year, before I arrived in 45° weather on a CitiBike and left without a breakfast burrito.BeReal is not a sufficient replacement.
This app is methadone for your opioid addiction. It almost feels like the real thing, but it isn’t, and you probably shouldn’t take it forever. It’s time to BeReal and just FaceTime your friends a little more often.It is incredibly difficult to stay informed about live events.
Okay, right now feels like a good time to squeeze in the fact that I created a second Instagram in CDMX. When we moved here, knowing no one, I opted to create a finsta that follows 25 accounts – music venues, DJ, chefs, galleries – for one specific purpose: what’s going on this week? I recognize you may call this cheating. Fair, but there are no rules. By following so few accounts with one specific purpose, I truly only check this weekly, for 5 minutes. Perhaps this should have been the premise of this post?
The internet has given us the blessing of being able to meaningfully maintain far more friendships across far greater distances than ever before. That is a fact. And for the friends we truly care about, we have nearly-infinite places to interact in, with no time constraints, arguably allowing us to become closer and more intimate than previous (offline) generations. Though, I’m not sure the majority of friendships we maintain online are anything more than a facade.
In other words, Instagram only theoretically allows us to go deeper. In reality, it handicaps our desire to intimately know people. To know your friend was in Paris is not to know how your friend is. And, for a lot of our friends, I think we’ve started to mistake the former for the latter. I decided to stop going on my Instagram for one real purpose: being incredibly intentional with how I spend my time. If our life is what we pay attention to and most of us acknowledge that we spend too much time paying attention to Instagram, why do we continue to do it?
Final note: delete your TikTok completely, it’s poison and CCP spyware and you’re better than that.
Epicly Later’d: Spike Jonze
I have a weird relationship with time where I basically remember everything that happened within the last 15 years as “a few years ago.” So it was nice to rewatch this Epicly Later’d episode on Spike Jonze, which in my mind came out recently but in reality is five years old. I’ve been looking up to Spike since he worked at Rockville BMX and would fix the brakes on my Mongoose. As he’s gone on to bigger and brighter things, I’ve always appreciated his exuberance and DIY attitude and the maintaining of his strong relationships to skateboarding and skaters. This video touches on all of it, in a knowing way.
—Justin
Dan Wieden Obituary
When I was in college a friend told me that she wanted to live a life that merited a New York Times obituary. That always stuck with me. Dan Wieden, founder of Wieden+Kennedy and creator of Nike’s “Just Do It” slogan certainly lived such a life. His Times obit is filled with inspiring anecdotes, including the time he told a client that they were out of their minds for not liking the work that was presented.
—Justin
Petite Maman
This rec comes from a friend whose advice I should’ve taken sooner, Alex Zhang.
I’ve been in a terrible movie slump lately. New country, terrible couch. After 6 months on my watchlist, we finally got around to watching this beautiful 72-minute film. A perfect weeknight movie. Going to get back into the swing of things and close out the year strong. Send recs.
—Andrew
Buy yourself flowers 💐
I’m quite obsessive about the smells in my apartment — candles, incense, soon: this diffuser (holding out for BFCM). Mexico City has florerías on every few corners. We’ve been treating ourselves to fresh flowers more frequently and the result is, most notably, a better smelling welcome home.
—Andrew