Life After Instagram
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I am over Instagram! No I am not a hipster, I am not technologically challenged and I am a fully functional millennial. I would say that I was quite good at “instagraming” as well. My life is interesting enough to conjure up a good picture once or twice a month, which earned me enough likes to boost my self-esteem and at the time I had close to +600 followers (for a semi-introvert, it’s not a bad number).
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I’d like to think I was one of the first people to have Instagram (like I said… like to think…), back when the only celebrities one could find were Jason Mraz or Tyra Banks, only 10 of my Facebook friends had Instagram, fitness pages actually showed fit-inspo content and pictures were memorable.
As time went on and Instagram gained popularity, the changes became apparent. The race to acquire the most likes and followers started to alter the nature of content placed online, with fitness pages becoming a place for soft-core pornography; Kardashian-like buttocks were plastered everywhere and surgically enhanced bodies became the new fitness goal. Obviously, I unfollowed the pages to unclutter my timeline, but there came a point where I would go through Instagram for hours, just scrolling through picture after picture, liking my friends’ pictures but not even taking notice of what I was really pressing like on. The pictures on my timeline felt repetitive; a selfie here and there, someone’s homemade food that looked like “art”, a travel picture and a celebrity doing something or indorsing a product. I even lost inspiration in the pictures I posted.
So, I deleted Instagram. I can’t say I regret it much because my phone battery lasts longer now, I feel less inclined to check how many likes a picture has gotten and I really do live more in the moment now, my activities aren’t staged to produce the perfect looking photograph. I do however believe that getting rid of Instagram isn’t for everyone, especially if said person has FOMO. I wont lie, at least once a year I am tempted to download Instagram again, just to see what I’m missing out on, but that feeling only lasts a millisecond.
I think the next step will be to eventually delete Facebook… eventually.