To be more specific, I deleted my Instagram and Snapchat apps, each one bringing me some kind of joy, but even more dread. Since making my first Instagram account back in 7th grade, rules and expectations about social media have changed drastically. There’s no more “monthly photo challenges” like “On the 7th, post a picture of what you ate for breakfast”, “On the 21st, post a picture of your favorite flower”, and so on. It’s as if the sole purpose of Instagram has shifted from keeping up with your friends’ lives and posting pictures of things that make you happy to trying to impress your followers (even strangers). It’s turned into posting the picture that you know will get more likes than the one you actually want to post, because the number that appears at the bottom of the picture is in some way more rewarding than the joy the picture itself brings you. This goes to such an extent that people will erase the picture from their feed entirely if it doesn’t reach the number of likes they were expecting. People will vow to themselves to post less when they lose followers because heaven forbid you post multiple pictures within a 10-day window. I’m not saying I don’t take part in this. I like to post pictures of where I’ve traveled, pictures of fun things I’ve do with friends and so on and I’m sure I will continue to. The thing that has pushed me over the edge to delete the app is the feeling I got when scrolling through the main feed. The constant feeling of jealousy I experienced every time I opened the app and began absentmindedly scrolling drove me crazy as I repeatedly compared myself to strangers in pictures. It made me unhappy. It made me feel bad about myself when I had no legitimate reason to.
Similarly, Snapchat also brings a feeling of jealousy and negativity. With the creation of stories, Snapchat has turned every weekend into a competition of who looks like they went to the sickest party and who did the craziest s**t while they were blacked out. I get how fun it is to have nights like that, believe me, but when I wake up on a Sunday morning after having a night in and tap through peoples’ stories from the previous night at parties, I feel bummed out. Even if I had the time of my life that night watching movies on a couch with my best friends squished on either side of me, crying from laughter, I started to feel bad about it. I felt a sense of disappointment in myself, like I wasn’t living enough, like I wasn’t meeting college expectations, but along with Instagram, I still take part in it.
With that being said, I still have my social media accounts, just not the apps. I know I will still post, but my personal goal is to not care about the number of times people have double-tapped one of my pictures and I think everyone else should do the same, although that’s easier said than done. I try to use it how I used it back in 7th grade: to keep up with my friends’ lives and for them to keep up with mine, not to compare myself to strangers who appear to have perfect lives or conform to our generations mysterious social norms. I deleted these apps that I would instinctively open to break the habit of distracting myself by glimpsing into other peoples’ lives instead of focusing on my own. I want to move away from what the majority of people spend the majority of their days doing: sliding their thumbs across a sheet of glass.