Leaving social media

Less transactional, more authenticity = leaving the apps

I joined instagram in 2012, when one of my friends a got a phone upgrade and gifted me her old iPhone. This was in the era where you could only join instagram when it was on an apple phone. Since then, it’s become my most-used app by far since the end of Twitter (RIP). I’ve cultivated so much community and friendship through this online platform, enthusiastically transitioning away from the individualities of livejournal and blogspot - streamlining the various facets of my life and experiences.

That said, I’ve learned so much through ig, and the therapeutic feeling of putting up photos, adding a filter and writing a cute caption is one I live for. I’ve posted memorial photos of my pets, documented my life and that of my friends, captured holidays, political moments and concert images. I’ve co-founded and run a grassroots pro-abortion account that now has over 12k followers.

I love going on instagram and looking up places and locations - e.g. ritualistically checking the Helsinki weather to see if the first flakes of snow had fallen before my recent trip there. I love meme humour. I follow fellow cold water swimmers to get an insight into their lives and our shared motivations for throwing ourselves into the great deep beyond. Did you know Joan Baez swam at the Forty Foot yesterday? I did. I saw the insta video.

With instagram, I don’t need to pick up the phone and call people, or make an effort really. I can just send folks a ‘thumbs up’ and they’ll know I’m thinking of them for a second, or lolling with them over a joke. Something awful has happened to my friend who lives abroad? I can send a heart, flip the screen and move on.

If I’ve had a tough day I can just look at the #sertraline or #depression hashtags and see how everyone else on planet fucked up is doing. I can lie on my bed, curtains closed, no lights on. I can lose myself in endless scrolling - voicing my opposition to egregious human rights violations being posted right now, in front of our eyes, by posting the ‘broken heart’ emoji.

I love the likes. I love that lil buzz I get from being ‘liked’ by my peers.

Breadcrumbs of affection.

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What are my values?

This is something I have been ruminating on a lot in recent weeks. It sounds strange to say that I’m not sure of my core values or needs. I have a sense of what I put ‘out there’: I am deeply principled, open-hearted and caring. How that relates to my inner person is another question. While I have a general vision of how I would like my life to evolve and grow - I know I’d like to get old and die in Tyrone, and be buried in the soft safe soil of home - there is a disconnect between all of these goals, values and hopes and who I am, how I feel, what I want: and how to connect with my self, shining some of that care, open-heartedness and principled nature inwards.

Instagram isn’t the root cause of this disconnect, but it sure is a by-product. When I engage online, I feel it is shallow. It’s fleeting. I send a ‘heart’ to a friend going through a difficult time and feel my duty is done. I put a filter on a photograph of myself to look ‘better’. I don’t hold a pen anymore. Nothing is tactile.

I don’t think I need to know everything that’s going on everywhere at any time. I don’t need to know if someone has viewed my story. Really, I don’t need to know that Joan Baez has gone for a swim in the Irish Sea. What I do need is honest, real, authentic, generous connections with people who matter to me. I need long-form ideas, rooted in the work of generations past and looking to now and the future. I need to be the kind of person who sees a friend having a difficult time and I pick up the phone, I write a letter, send a care package. I need to be the kind of person who writes on paper, keeps photo albums, slows it right down.

Joan Baez, icon, musician, sea swimmer (1960s).

I also need and require the people in my life to mirror this back (in whatever capacity they have). If I’ve spent since 2012 on instagram cultivating a dopamine-driven hit where my life revolves around me giving breadcrumbs, friends giving breadcrumbs back and we all accept this as ‘good’ emotional contact, then I’m not only out - I’m deciding not to accept this way of life any more. I want the loaf.

And so, the only course of action I can see is that at the end of 2024, I’m leaving instagram. In doing so, I understand this means I might lose people whose lives I see every day - people who I have so much affection for. But the hope is that in leaving the world of easy, transactional, minimal communication - something stronger, more rooted and meaningful will grow in that space.

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Slowing down

And so, substack will be my only ‘social media’ space going forward into 2025. I’m preparing for this shift by doing the following:

• A phased approach to leaving instagram - account will remain active from January - end of February, to be deleted 1 March,

• Using the Connected off the App spreadsheet from Cody at

  Monday Monday
  to get ready for leaving instagram during the Jan-Feb months,

• Reducing media consumption - committing to buying print newspapers and a subscription to Tortoise Media for news when it’s ready and not knee-jerk,

• Re-subscribing to print media magazines such as Red Pepper and Outdoor Swimmer magazine,

• Using my browser bookmarks section to keep in the loop with important online magazines (purchase subscriptions if possible) such as Scalawag and Rewire News,

• Use the internet again - not just scrolling on apps! Follow good journalists down rabbit holes and find new writers, thinkers and work - the way I used to find out about bands and music in the 2000s online,

• Say words like ‘surf the net’ again, just because it’s cute.

In the space and time that’s freed up by leaving social media, I wonder what might happen? I have plans for Sweden or Vienna in early 2025, which would be very interesting travel experiences without social media. I anticipate I will read a lot more! And maybe crafting? Who knows!

There was a beautiful reading on The Moth recently from a woman who worried she might never find love again after two divorces. Of course she found love again. And lost it again! She rode the waves of life and decided to throw herself into her passions and all new kinds of loves appeared for her through those interests. So for 2025, I’m throwing dating apps in the bin too.

WhatsApp, you’re next.

Maybe for 2026 I’ll get that barbie flip-phone I have my eye on.