So last week I made the decision to leave Instagram. With the chaos and misinformation being put out there these days, I’d been thinking about it for a while, but I couldn’t pull the trigger until one song—and one video—pushed me over the edge.
I was making a compilation of all the great winter activities I experienced with friends and family this year, and was loving how it was coming together. It showed people climbing, skiing, snowboarding, skinning, racing, flipping—it had everything. While making it, I was listening to music, and one of the songs that came on was Hozier’s Eat Your Young. If you haven’t heard it, it’s great—perfect for a video showing a bunch of people tackling the great outdoors. I attached the song to the reel and was pleased to see the timing was spot on.
But before posting anything online I always listen carefully to the lyrics of the song choice in order to see if it aligns with a meaning I’m going for. And you know what Eat Your Young is about? It’s about cannibalizing the next generation for your own personal gain. It’s about greed and feasting on others to elevate your own status. And while I don’t think there is anything bad about a fun video that shows people having fun without revealing their actual faces, the song made me stop and consider: who am I posting this video for?
I frequently get messages from people telling me they are inspired by my videos and the other photography I put out there, which is deeply gratifying—it’s been a big reason I’ve done it for so long and it kept me on Instagram way longer than I should have stayed. But lately I’ve been getting more and more disheartened by what I see on the platform and hate how bad it is for all of us. Particularly for our kids. Doom scrolling reels is no way to grow up.
When you consider the reports of early dementia-like brain scans coming out of Australia, likely related to social media phone use, it’s clear we need to change things up. None of us want to be part of the problem contributing to results like that, and it got me thinking. Who am I serving by posting a video of my friends and family skiing the crap out of some mountain? Sure, it looks cool. My kids’ friends will be stoked, and their classmates might think “badass,” but at what cost? So they become more addicted to looking at their social media? So they waste more of their time on Instagram? So I increase their risk of early dementia and contribute to everyone’s brain rot? Talk about eating your young.
So, I opted out. I’m not suffering too much from the detox over it because I mostly just posted on Instagram as opposed to doom scrolling, but I am enjoying having one less thing to check on my phone. I am now completely free of social media, phone-wise, which is fantastic. My biggest vice right now is a five-minute Wordle session and that feels a lot healthier than Instagram. I still have a Facebook account I access through my desktop, so I can get messages from people via both Facebook and Instagram, but that’s about the extent of my use. I check that once or twice a day and that’s it. It’s more akin to doing a quick email check rather than a dive into a visual pool of ADHD.
It’s only been a handful of days so far, but I’m already feeling like I have a good chunk of my time and my life back. And more time for writing! If you’re considering hopping off the Instagram train, I don’t think you’ll be disappointed. I can happily say, it’s quite nice.