I deleted my Instagram account in March. As I was riding a bicycle down the river, it hit me. What a disgusting space it was. How completely at odds with my values.
Partially, it was about what it did to me. How my thumb knew to find the icon seemingly by itself. How I felt powerless to resist. How angry it made me with myself.
And then the realization that I was creating content for it, so my friends would feel the same. And deep down I felt that I didn’t want to be a part of it anymore.
Then my head stepped in and asked: “But what about all the beautiful things?” Surely, there are plenty of those. But it’s not about that. It’s about the monstrous machinery the beautiful things live in. Like a flower arrangement in a slaughterhouse.
In this slaughterhouse, you are the meat and the engineers don’t really care about beauty.
Reach
On one occasion, a woman I knew spent five minutes directing my attention, through an avalanche of words, intensely toward my right hand. At the end of it I felt every bone, each joint, I felt the blood running through my veins and skin wrapping around the flesh. The right hand felt very different from the left. Attention is powerful.
In order to do anything that matters, we must first be able to give attention to the things that matter. Doing so has never been easy, but lately it’s become harder in new and surprising ways ~ James Williams (2018)
In Latin, attendere means to stretch. To reach. But while stretching is a slow, deliberate movement, scrolling reduced my attention to a twitch. Just a quick reflex, a spasm designed to hijack my brain’s reward mechanism. It forced me to trade intention for impulse. Hijacked attention, hooked on the tiny dopamine shots I got every time I glimpsed something I liked.
In the short term, giving attention to Instagram was distracting me from what I actually wanted to do: sew a dress. Practice the piano. Go for a run. But in the long term, it was chipping away at my ability to pursue and achieve goals that really matter to me: Make my own clothes. Play the Gnossienne. Be fit.
Because even an 30 minutes of my daily attention directed toward the feed was too much distraction. Attention allows me to focus and to learn, create, and connect. It amplifies my senses, so I can truly see, feel, and smell, and, just as importantly, be seen, felt (and smelled) by others.
Scrolling Instagram feed I instead gave attention to Meta and serving their goal, which is dead simple: showing me ads.
Instagram promises that it ”brings you closer to the people and things you love”. But does it really?
In my experience, the feed does not really feel nourishing. It’s even called a feed. Get it? Fodder. Much of what I was being served felt more like fast food than a nourishing meal. Images of bikers, hikers, nature. Exercise. Cool buildings. Impressive art. Pretty objects, good-looking people, cute animals.
But what I truly want are experiences that fill me, and satisfy my needs: feet in the grass, a laugh with a friend, playing an instrument, walking in the forest, the smell of food being prepared.
The Instagram experience is instead packed with empty calories, that just as real fast food, left me craving for more. It is part of the business model.
Targeting me with an ad for anti-ageing cream does not make much sense if I do not care about wrinkles. They can not sell me a solution for a problem I don’t think I have, but they can manufacture the feeling that something is missing.
Make me compare my body to other bodies. My home to other homes. My life to other lives. Show me experiences I am not having, places I am not visiting, things I do not own, people I do not look like. It holds a carrot on a stick that will never be close enough to eat.
This compulsive feeding of my brain with images from an algorithmic feed is not merely distracting. It is manipulative. Every day, I was reaching for a system designed to hijack my attention, pull me away from my own goals, and keep me hungry.
In the end, I was the one being consumed.
Release
Commercial social media has become a toxic environment that we don’t really choose, but are pushed into by peer pressure. Instagram alone has over 3 billion users worldwide, and the number keeps growing.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
We can build spaces where algorithms work for us: making us calmer, more informed, more empathetic, more cooperative. Or spaces where algorithms simply get out of the way.
For me, richness in life comes from movement. Being up and about with wind in my hair, dancing, fingers in soil, or shaping clay. Senses touching the environment, smoke from a fire, warmth on my skin, blackbird’s song in the air.
Getting sucked into a feed I stop breathing, stop feeling thirst. I stop feeling like a body in a world. Moreover, I spend time in an environment where the engineers don’t give a damn about my well being. Where I am being actively manipulated. That is made by a company that has repeatedly been sued for fueling addiction and knowingly harming their users mental health.
So I left.
My thumb no longer looks for the icon. There is less to do on my phone. And stopping this compulsive behavior has made it easier to stop other compulsive habits too. Like snacking when I’m bored or looking for comfort.
I am more present. I read books. I’m learning to play the piano. I call my mom. I spend those 30 minutes on pilates with Nicole instead. And I’m realizing that my life is far too rich to even miss the feed.
In an old anecdote, Alexander the Great walked up to a sun bathing Diogenes, the Greek cynic philosopher that lived in a barrel, and asked him what he desired. Diogenes simply answered: “Stand out of my sun.”
As surely as a guy in a barrel could tell the king to piss off, we can refuse to have our attention milked to fund somebody’s private island compound. Ditch Meta’s cash cow. Get some sun.
Rewire
Leaving Instagram behind created space to think about what it was I was really looking for.
When an overwhelming urge to share comes over me now, I send out a couple of private messages. Have a little conversation. Check on how people are doing. I also discovered that some people actually look at the stories sections on WhatsApp and Signal. So I sometimes share there. It’s cute and doesn’t keep me or anybody else scrolling forever.
When I crave inspiration, I might reach out to some of the beautiful magazines out there. Like MacGuffin or Fukt. I go through them regularly and explore, engaging with the content more deeply, reading essays and interviews with the artists, look repeatedly at the same things and discover something new every time. It’s so different from just swiping away to the next and next and next.
I love making photos just for the pretty pictures sake, so I became a Wikimedia contributor. Now my photos are out there and free of copyright, so anybody can use them if they like. The spirit of the Wikipedia project, passion for information and free sharing of knowledge, resonates way more with my own values, and so contributing actually feels good.
There are more projects out there, like the Fediverse, where Mastodon is the Twitter alternative and pixelfed is the Instagram alternative. These projects copy the format of popular social media, but put them into the hands of the people. They still miss critical mass. But critical mass is made of people. It is up to us to make the move.
We don’t have to reach for spaces that just suck us in. We can choose where to put our attention. We can make spaces of our own.
So get out there, my dear reader. Get some sun. Choose where you put your attention. Find the spaces that are good for you, and fill them with beautiful things.
