For half of my life, I didn’t know who I was without Instagram

From living in the Anxious Generation to the relief of freedom

It’s not like I ever thought social media was good for me. I knew it was probably bad, but so was everything else about middle school. All spaces at that time, real and digital, were social warzones, where nasty rumors were spread, nicknames were assigned, and alliances formed and broke hastily. The anxiety I felt around likes, followers, and filters wasn’t different from what I felt in the hallway or at a party playing spin-the-bottle. We take the tech we grow up alongside for granted; I didn’t know I was among the Anxious Generation. I only found out this year.

Jonathan Haidt insists that I, and all of my friends, were “rewired,” in great part, by social media. He claims we were defenseless against its ad-based revenue models, algorithms, and gamified social currency systems, which marred our social, emotional, and cognitive development in countless and insidious ways. As I mentioned, I already knew that on some level. I have never felt thoroughly happy or content while scrolling — just compelled to.

My middle-school Tumblr feed was awash with romanticized drug, eating disorder, and sexual abuse content. My peers used anonymous question-and-answer sites like Formspring and later, Ask.fm, explicitly for bullying. I assumed that’s what the sites were created for, and still do. By the time I was a high school sophomore, I was exclusively using Facebook to publicly and nastily argue social and actual politics. Everyone was always on edge, on the defense, guns blazing. Simultaneously, we exchanged nude photos of ourselves over Snapchat and then used them to shame and blackmail each other. Everything we did on social media was that uncomfortable flavor of thrilling. I used, checked, and explored the edges of these apps obsessively, compulsively, and haphazardly. Those reward cycles and that consistent guilty gut feeling were all I knew.

But many of those apps came and went — when they got boring, uncool, or were replaced. Our aunts overtook Facebook. Vine died. I think Yik Yak only lasted about a year. BeReal didn’t appeal to me. I eventually felt embarrassingly old on Snapchat and TikTok, so I got rid of them. But Instagram was too vital. Instagram has only gotten more nostalgic, relevant, necessary, and addictive. With the introductions of the Explore Tab, the Stories feature, and (god help us all) Reels, my usage went up, and my sleep, self-esteem, and time spent in the real world went down. Before reading The Anxious Generation, I had spent a decade trying to devote less time and energy to Instagram.

I set a time limit on the app, made my phone’s display black and white, turned off notifications, archived all my posts, manually unfollowed and removed followers, avoided the more addictive features, limited myself to the desktop version, and deleted the app many times, though I would always redownload it a few days later. I broke every new rule I made about Instagram because deleting it felt like deleting my only genuine way to see the world, and have the world see me. Instagram was how I plugged my writing and shared my ideas. It was where I got all my news about my friends, the publishing industry, celebrities, and local and global politics. It fed me trends, memes, job openings, info about local protests, and dopamine. By the third day off it, I could never handle the literal chemical withdrawal. No activity was as satisfying as flicking through Reels; I felt a harrowing blankness even watching TV without my phone out.

But something — or everything — about The Anxious Generation convinced me I had no other option if I cared about my well-being. I could suddenly name what had happened to me and wasn’t despondent but furious about it. I couldn’t believe I had let myself become such a zombie, Mark Zuckerberg’s pawn, and my own brand manager. I was wasting the precious days of my life curating what Naomi Klein calls my “digital double.” When Patricia Lockwood asked, “Was there even a gloaming any more?” I didn’t know the answer. I had been collecting thousands of bits of information every day, but wasn’t getting smarter, more worldly, or more tolerant. I was just image-obsessed, overwhelmed, and deep-fried.

So, when I was twenty-six, I deactivated the account I had made when I was thirteen. It felt like kicking down a sandcastle I had spent half my life building, and believing it was an actual castle. And as soon as I got out of the woods, the woods looked haunted.

Within two weeks, Instagram — and the way I was when I was on it — didn’t just seem shallow or useless but unhinged. As pathetic as this is, the more time I spent learning, socializing, and just doing stuff in the real world, the more I realized how fake and bizarre Instagram analogs are. For years, liking, viewing, and following felt like real actions communicating real things. Celebrities unfollowing each other is treated like news. But if some girl I sort of knew from high school saw me on the street and didn’t wave, I would be relieved, not offended. So why did I lose my shit when I found out she had unfollowed me? How many times was I angry about something that only made me angry because of the norms and expectations of these apps, perpetuated by predatory actors? How happy might I have been without them?

The recent, though alien memories kept flooding in. I realized, in horror, that for years, I fantasized about the post-vacation Instagram post more than I looked forward to being on vacation. I would be at work or in class, carefully and gleefully designing a carousel of images that didn’t exist yet, planning out their vibe, angles, cropping, order, and caption, and imagining all the comments I would get.

Whenever I posted, I would purposely put my phone down for twenty minutes (that was as long as I could stand it) so that when I picked it back up, I could scroll through a lengthy list of Like notifications, which was more satisfying than watching them trickle in. I knew exactly how and when to hit the joint to get the most high.

Whenever I met someone new, and we exchanged Instagrams, I would go home and scroll through my grid, not theirs, to imagine how my profile looked from their perspective. Often, I would end up deleting something. My brand was forever fickle — there were clues that the castle was, in fact, a sandcastle everywhere, but I didn’t want to look.

Five days after disabling my account, my husband referenced a meme I’d never heard of. We stared at each other for a long, puzzled moment. That had never happened to us before. That night, I had my first-ever fantasy about not having an Instagram. I imagined someone who didn’t like me, like an ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend, going to look for me, and me not being there.

Since most photos I took were with Instagram in mind, I stopped taking so many. And it feels different when I take them now, knowing they’re just for me to bear witness to my own life. I think about my clothing and my face differently and feel different at museums, concerts, and protests. The feeling is knowing I’ll live all those moments once, and not over and over again, on Instagram. I still feel ashamed and sometimes glum, but no bad feeling comes close to the relief. I am so relieved to have such massive chunks of my brain and time back, and I’m excited to use them.