Fuck Instagram

It's that time of year.

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Photo by Prateek Katyal on Unsplash

I spent my junior year of college in Granada, Spain. This was 2005, and though Craigslist was a robust entity back in the states, in southern Spain the way you found an apartment was by wandering around the city and ripping phone numbers off those ad posters with people’s contact information fanning out like teeth across the bottom. We were encouraged to not live with other Americans, and I shared a piso with a Spanish woman from Granada and another exchange student from Naples. My room overlooked the same courtyard as another student’s who would become one of my closest friends (to this day!), and when our cheap phones ran out of minutes we would whistle across the courtyard to each other, make plans from our windows, wander about the tiny city ordering too many cafés or tubos of cheap beer with a (free! tapas are free in Granada!) tapa, a generous custom that felt like a miracle every time, even thirteen years later when I returned for a quick visit as a much older and utterly sober thirty-five year old.

In Spain, afternoons are for siesta. Everything except some cafés and restaurants closes for three full hours in the afternoon, and so did the university: I had classes in the morning and evening, and that long-ass break smack dab in the center. What would I do with my free time?

At first I did my best to cram in as much sightseeing as I could. Sometimes this meant dodging the dry southern Spanish heat of of late-summer-early-fall by catching my breath in the cool pews of dark cathedrals. Other times it was climbing up to the Mirador de San Nicolas, staring at the Alhambra and eating gelato while locals played flamenco and tourists fumbled over castanets. More often than not it meant walking, sweating, stuffing my face with overripe figs, feeling even more out of place than I already did by dint of being the only weirdo out on the street.

After some weeks of this, I gave over. I’d come home to my apartment, eat, and lay around. Sometimes I’d do homework. Sometimes I’d watch episodes of Shin-Chan, dubbed in Spanish from Japanese. Sometimes I’d collage, or paint, something I hadn’t had time for in years.

My inner rhythm slowed. I began to unwind.

This was the pre-smart-phone era, and also the year I made a Facebook account, which at the time still looked like this:

Years later I spent another year abroad, this time in the mountains of Northern Thailand, and my rhythm slowed again. Each time I returned to San Francisco after an extended trip away, I vowed to hold onto this sense of slowness. I committed to continuing on in my American city life in a way that honored what had come to be one of my deepest values: Simplicity. And I don’t mean this in the minimalist sense, that aesthetic that’s become ubiquitous in all of our internet feeds, although I do own very few things; more, it’s a choice to live slow, to savor my days, to be present with myself and the people in my orbit, to work hard, but not too much, and ultimately, to take a stand against that thing in our culture that has us feel like something is deeply wrong when we have a few hours of downtime.

You know what is the opposite of these values? Scrolling away my time, which is to say, my life, on social media.

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Mine is the last generation that experienced a computer-free childhood. As an elder millennial—the generation which, you might be surprised to learn, spans the years 1981-1996—nobody I knew had a computer in their house until junior high. Computers were already around, however: I remember having computer lab a few times per week in grade school, where we’d clack away at the keys, learning to type, finishing out the hour with a few trips down The Oregon Trail. I remember getting an at-home computer in eighth or ninth grade, which would have been 1998 or 1999, and playing Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? setting up my email account (lovelydani@hotmail.com, omg), and typing up essays for my English classes. I remember the dial-up modem—such a specific noise (close your eyes and listen, I know you hear it too)— the sound an electronic proxy of nails-on-a-chalkboard. Occasionally I dipped my toe into message boards and chat rooms, but entertainment online back then was not what it is now and I’d quickly grow bored, or be distracted by someone hitting me up on my pager (RIP to all the pagers).

I finally got an iPhone in 2012, a later adopter not so much by choice but because those were the broke-ass years, the $500/month rent years, the living off beans, tacos and cheap booze years, and for a long time I could not justify spending my pennies on a pocket-sized computer (I held onto that Nokia 3310 as long as possible, and had a couple of unmemorable flip phones after it’s demise). Anyway, I finally got one. I remember sitting at Shotwells with Dave, and downloading my very first app: Instagram. I am nostalgic for the early days of Instagram, before the onslaught of ads, before everyone became a brand, when it was still inane and innocent and we thought those sepia filters made us artists (RIP to the early days of social media, back when it still felt friendly and uncomplicated).

I know I’m not alone in how much I struggle with social media. I revisit the past to shine light on how much hanging out online has changed, and to remember that it didn’t always feel so confusing. “Social media habits” didn’t used to be a concern. Now, it’s so bad that even the phones themselves include software to help you control yourself (which I don’t even bother with because I just…override them).

Sometimes, I try to remember how I spent my time before I carried the whole world in my purse. As a kid, as a teenager, what did I do to pass the time? College was the first time many of us had our own computers, but aside from homework and downloading music from Limewire, the computer just kind of sat there, a hulking, whirring backdrop to a life spent—doing what? I want to reconnect to these things so that I might return to them now. I weary of how much of my life I funnel into a screen.

I fantasize about what it would be like for it all—Facebook, Instagram, Twitter—to just disappear. I imagine a return to a time that in my memory is far simpler, even as I acknowledge that comparing the desires—not to mention responsibilities—of the woman I am now to the girl I was at 10 or 12, while a fun little thought experiment, is ultimately a false equivalency. I know that to call for abandoning all social media that would be as absurd as wishing we’d all throw our TV’s out the window. Mostly, all of this remembering is just another doorway into the ongoing inner-conundrum I am never not in conversation with, which is to say, a persistent longing for all that would open back up: Attention. Time. Dignity. Entire relationships. Less stress and urgency. Peace of mind (can you imagine).

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As someone who is building a business, I am in a conversation with social media always. I want it to be this easy breezy thing where I can just post and not get so hung up about everything but I can’t, and I’m tired of trying to push through this. None of it is “easy breezy.” Maybe it started that way. But it’s morphed, not unlike how a certain substance was fun and easy breezy and worked and made things better, until it absolutely didn’t and I realized how much it was detracting (murdering) rather than adding to my life.

At least once per year, I hit saturation. On Instagram, I know I’m hitting saturation when the echo chamber starts to rankle: Everyone I follow has similar beliefs to me which means I’m getting an inaccurate sense of reality; our similarities mean the same memes get reposted over and over; I get to the end of my feed and again and it’s at the end of the feed where shit gets particularly weird. I deactivated my Facebook account last year, which I haven’t missed. Even Substack¹, where I’ve been writing for three years, feels echo-chambery, in-crowdy these days: Suddenly the people I subscribe to are reposting each others’ work over and over and I’m sitting here wondering about all the ideas and perspectives I’m missing because I do that human thing where I’m seeking out other people just like me and therefore if I'm not careful it's very easy for my sense of reality to become limited at best, hella skewed at worst.

A couple weeks ago I read an article called “To Quit or Not To Quit Social Media: Opportunity Cost Can Help You Decide” and let’s just say it’s put me on the brink. I’m *almost* to that place of being done. I’m *just about* trusting that I can create a thriving business in ways that don’t include trying to get ahead of the motherfucking algorithm. Even this conversation is buzzing around recently! In the past week alone I’ve read multiple accounts of other people either sharing their own inner-conundrums and or declaring that they’re finally deleting their accounts. More often than not, these people already have massive followings so ostensibly there’s less of a risk for them to disappear into the mist; I am choosing to believe that there’s a whole world of opportunity abounding outside of my screen and I’m going to spend this next quarter experimenting with that.

I’m in the conversation of…what if. What if I let it go? What if I trust that I can still build things without it? What if this is the next stage of the Self Made experiment, the one where I actually practice what I preach, which is that I know what I need better than anyone else?

The days of innocuous photo sharing and hitting thumbs-up button on your pal’s dumb status update are no more. Every time I come up for air after losing myself in the scroll, I feel worse. Worse about myself, my days, how I’m living. Worse toward my fellow humans. Worse about the state of the world. My memory gets shot.

“There are only two industries that call their customers 'users': illegal drugs and software.”

Edward Tufte, a computer scientist at Yale University

You understand why the above quote gives me pause. This all feels too similar to the way I spent decades agonizing about my relationship with alcohol, trying to find a way to manage it instead of just being done.

For now, I’m not disappearing. I’ll still post if I feel like it and don’t worry, the Tater highlights will continue. But I’m listening to my body on this one—to that visceral sense of relief I’ve been feeling ever since I read that article and a window opened in my brain, the understanding that I could just…stop.

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I’ve always been a seeker. But it’s taken me many many years to understand that what I was seeking was not some great supernova of insight that would finally reveal to me my purpose and place in the world, but something far more mundane and quotidian. What I was seeking, what I sought to recreate after long periods of time away from home, and what I am infinitely protective of now, was/is a basic sense of satisfaction. Of wanting what I already have. Of going to bed at night with an easy stomach and a quiet heart. Of redirecting my attention when I get caught in the swirl of comparison. Of trusting that the way I do things is the way I do things.

Away from my screen, I am agog at the wonder of small things. The way the neighbors on my block look out for each other, and even Tater (Will across the street regularly leaves treats and toys under my front gate for the little chompers). How the scrub jays screech and wail, the squirrels scamper about with their cheeks popped full of acorns, the spiders slink through still open windows and into the corners of my bedroom in their familiar winter arrival. Then there’s the stop-you-in-your-tracks-abundance of blossoms fireworking off the magnolia tree, my inability to not go out of my way to cross the street and stick my nose in every last one.

What I’m saying is: Time is precious. I’m saying, despite everything, that I am still in love with the world. I’m saying, also, is I can hardly believe what’s arising in the giving over — space! wildness! joy! connection! presence! I’m saying that most people are more good than not. I’m saying that we have a say in this. Still. I’m saying it’s not too late.

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SELF MADE is a rebellious recovery community that empowers you to liberate yourself from societal programming and boldly step into a life of your design. Posts are written by me, Dani Cirignano, founder, writer, Integral coach, and recovery guide based in San Francisco, CA. 

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1. Just want to say! I am HAPPY people are migrating to Substack - I love ANYTHING that migrates us away from social media. It’s just something that I’ve noticed, that everyone is writing here now.