I deleted my Instagram account in May 2024. Deleting it’s not the “I’m taking a break, guys” or the “Social Media Detox” we see influencers perform, usually followed by a long caption about their week-long epiphanies. It’s also not the “My assistant will manage my socials now” move celebrities make when the digital panopticon becomes too much. Deleting is deleting, and there is no reversing it. Your followers: gone. You: disappearing into a void. The end of the world as you know it! Only that…it isn’t.

In August 2024, a few months after quitting social media, I wrote an essay called “So I deleted my Instagram account…now what?” on my Substack Sad Little Life. I write to make sense of things, and this time was no different. I felt pulled in opposite directions: on one side, the relief of no longer living a life I had treated for public consumption, and the agency that came with it. On the other, a fear of “wasting potential,” of being forgotten, or even sabotaging myself by opting out of the ocean of opportunities platforms like Instagram used to be. (Key word here: used.)

To my surprise - I often joke that nobody reads my newsletter g- the piece took off: thousands of likes, over a hundred comments and reposts, with numbers still growing. It might seem hypocritical to mention metrics while criticising platforms built on external validation, but bear with me. My point is: it resonates, and people want out. We are sick of it, and still we linger, convinced we need to be there. Think of it like your office Christmas party: it peaked a long time ago, and no one is having fun anymore. You’re free to leave.

After Instagram, I deleted TikTok (Brain Rot Ltd), Facebook (Marketplace bargains weren’t worth the ads and AI slop), and LinkedIn (never found a job opportunity in there, but I did find an urge to slap in the face networking bros that jump-scared me with The 7 Things I Learned When I Was Fired From My Own Start Up).

The first months off were hard. I had been sharing my life online since I was 18, receiving PR gifts (more clothes than I could wear, more makeup than I could ever use), sponsored trips, and some money. It quickly became clear my brain was deeply hooked on dopamine and validation. When you’re used to thinking in captions and seeing experiences as content, adjusting to a life without it is disorienting.

The withdrawal was real, but like all withdrawals, it didn’t last forever.

The first thing you notice when the dust settles is time - an uncomfortable amount of it. At first, you don’t know what to do with it, so you default to the one thing you can’t avoid: thinking. Without memes or IG reels to distract you, you think…A LOT. That thinking replaced scrolling and forced me to confront something I had expertly avoided: I was miserable in my comfortable, mind-numbing, mortgage-friendly office job. But how was I to know, when every spare second had been spent distracting myself with content?

Quitting social media led to introspection, which led to uncomfortable revelations, which led to a horrible depression, which led to therapy, which led me to quit my office job and be unemployed for the first time in five years. With savings shrinking fast, I reconnected with a version of myself I hadn’t seen since I first moved to this country: resilient, resourceful, hopeful. That’s what I call a seismic chain of events.

The growing interest in Digital Minimalism, r/Dumbphones, neuroplasticity, or the so-called “Analog trend” is just a symptom of a larger craving: time is precious, and one day we’ll regret how much of it we spent staring at our phones, invested in other people’s lives, celebrity gossip, or filling online carts with things we didn’t need.

Cal Newport wrote, “Your life is what you pay attention to.” I’ve never engaged with Leith the way I do now. I now work part-time at an independent shop here, and I have time and energy to do the things I love (like writing this). It pays less, but I feel fulfilled and more connected to my neighbourhood than ever. Bumping into familiar faces, chatting with people in the shop, discovering events through posters, word of mouth and local newsletters. Some say going off social media shrinks your world, but I’ve found the opposite: my world is now fully breathing. 

Instead of constant access, it’s full of surprise and a kind of childlike wonder - it asks me to be present, to live my life rather than perform it. A pretty good deal if you ask me.

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