February is for Deleting Instagram Forever
“I have deleted Instagram forever” is something that took me years to say.
I am 24 now and I made an Instagram account when I was 13. This means that for the majority of my life that I can remember I have had an Instagram account. For many years, being on the app has made me feel a little weird and rotten. The image of a baby tarantula tangled in its own web comes in mind. I don’t know if the right term is addiction, toxic relationship, or dependency, but it hasn’t been healthy. I find the word most people use when announcing this news most telling - “I quit Instagram!”
A couple of people asked me why I was deleting it instead of something less radical, and I thought, what a great opportunity for a giant, cross-referenced, scientifically-backed article covering every single reason in detail! That is not what you will be reading today, though, because I apparently cannot fit 11 years of thoughts and research into a 15-minute read.
What I wrote instead is a record of my personal reasoning behind deleting Instagram in 2026, a journal section of my observations as I went, and some practical advice.
Why I am deleting Instagram
My decision to delete Instagram came right after what would turn out to be my final attempt to take it seriously as a creator. In December last year I enthusiastically decided: Actually, there is nothing cringe about making a reel, people do it all the time!I can definitely do this! then I went on to record exactly one voice over for a video before I had a crash out. I desperately wanted to act like myself but I couldn’t. Because myself wouldn’t make a reel.
If I could turn on my Imagination fully, wayback-machine it to some 2014 intact state of mind, I would probably describe the perfect way to promote my art this way:
I wake up and I hear the rooster’s first calls. I am a morning person, fully capable of meeting the new day with a zest and energy. I yawn and stretch my arms, my feet softly thumping on the warm white rug at the side of my bed, and I descend the stairs to the kitchen. I eat and then I rush out the house and down the street like a Ghibli character and all my neighbours, who are all either hosing their gardens or inventing crazy machines in their backyards, greet me and ask me how work is going, and I tell them: Ah yes, rewilding the local wetland is going great, we just got the approval to dismantle the dam and hopefully sturgeons populations will be seeing a great rise in numbers-
Hold on. Sorry.
I will analyse this freshly emerged discrepancy between my chosen path and dream life another time. Point is, I never even wanted a successful social media channel, just the life I thought it might lead me to if I tried hard enough. It was the path I was told I should be in order to be an artist or writer. But that is not why I deleted, it’s the when.
For the why, let’s check this out:
(some) CONS OF INSTAGRAM
Addiction/compulsion to keep checking it
Unknown long term effects on the brain (What if I’m becoming really dumb??)
Neurological stress
Anxiety, specifically the climate anxiety that comes from a headline with no call to action
Derealisation
Diminished attention span
Diminished ability to push through boredom
Diminished skill of handling emotional dysregulation
Political sensationalism (Posts on issues I care about get drowned out by whatever irrelevant headlines the American empire is churning out that week)
Cultural homogenization and USA-fication of the world
Manipulative algorithms/surrendering narrative control
A constant reminder of how cruel and bigoted people can be through the miracle of comment sections
Absorption and commodification of 3rd spaces
Endless stream of ads (And if you block those Turkish rhinoplasty accounts, you engage with them, so more of them come flooding)
Time consuming (It’s fun, but so is being blackout drunk. I’d rather remember what was so fun)
The fear of missing out never subdues
The same jokes and comments all over again and again + personality loss (I will never type a skull to indicate I’m laughing)
And no female nipples allowed!!!
Turns out I don’t want to be a popular artist or to have income from my art bad enough to disrespect my resistance to Instagram. I don’t even want to be entertained or witnessed or reached out to if it means it is done through this specific channel.
You know that feeling when you are watching a show and one of the characters is scrolling through social media and it just doesn’t feel beautiful to watch? I can romanticise a pixelated print on polyester fabric, a non-emptied water bottle in the park trashcan, a tall office building, or most other 21st century zeitgeist elements. It’s all still rocks and metal and oil and Earth. But social media feels so soulless to me. I began perceiving my own POV like a show where the character is scrolling through Instagram for hours. Watching myself surrender control looked so… ugly.
Some nights I have beautiful dreams, thick-aired, pink-skyed, magical worlds, and then wake up into a sterile, checklist optimised, pale, socially alienated, exhaust fume world, and in those moments I want to run away from not just Instagram, but all of it, and read a thousand old books until I remember what it used to be like not so long ago, until my inner world thickens up again.
This feeling is my why.
Timeline
I recently found a note from 2019 planning my glow up for 2020 with a category called “digital detox” inside of it:
get a dumb phone
get a wrist watch and an alarm clock
delete Instagram
6 years! I had completely forgotten about this until I found it. I can’t stand to know that I was so dependant on an… app. Something seemingly so optional held so much power over me. I kept telling myself I could delete if I wanted to and that my educated awareness was shielding me from mindless usage. I think secretly I never could if I wanted to up until now.
...
In late December 2025 I went through all 950 accounts I followed on Instagram and checked out every single Linktree, website, online shop, Soundcloud, Youtube, Behance linked in their bios; I followed elsewhere, bookmarked their websites meticulously, asked for people’s numbers. Built an RSS feed from the websites with compatible feeds. And then I unfollowed everyone.
Even whilst following 0 accounts, my feed was full. I kept the app, still compulsively clicking on it, and all I saw was recommended posts about these following topics: people leaving social media; anti-Spotify; anti-AI; “2026 is the year of physical media”, “analog things to do”; and then uhh, Bjork’s commentary on Trump invading Greenland.
Instagram knew on what sort of wave I was and pushed content on those topics. This is common knowledge but it feels different to see it with your eyes. You wanna quit social media and maybe buy a van? Boom: the TROBOLO WandaGO unit composting van toilet for on-the-go giveaway shows up on your feed and all you have to do is promote this brand to maybe win. (No, I did not win)
What blows my mind is that this happens all the time about all of our interests, especially political opinions. We are being shown content based on our own held values and interests. 90% of our For-you-pages consist of the algorithm we built for ourselves, and 10% is the algorithm slowly building us while taking the path of least resistance.
I have sensed other people’s viral content in my head during very intimate moments of my life. Pop psychology accounts’ simplified hot takes on relationship conflict, while fighting with my partner. Avocado Ibuprofen making fun of care-themed art and mycelium metaphors right after I freshly discovered those topics, making me insecure about my genuine interests because apparently somewhere in Berlin it was too trendy. A fellow activist’s story rant about how no one deserves a break until we essentially win the class war, while I was skipping on a protest. Someone’s mocking reply to one of my leaving-Instagram stories punching me down for “being cooked and brainrotted”, in my head while writing this entire article. Etc etc etc. Random people’s random thoughts which I absorbed like a sponge. The single-instance nature of those made me notice and remember them.
But what about a feed that goes on for months and years? I believe our perceptions and behaviours slowly shift. The hivemind reshapes its moral consensus fairly quickly, or I should say the little atomised hiveminds do. I believe that no matter how self-aware and vigilant, no one is immune to slow mind-altering, and that cumulative influence is definitely happening if you’re on Instagram for long enough.
For example, while scrolling on my entirely algorithmically curated feed last month, I stumbled on a reel about media piracy. It was a video someone took of a vendor selling secondhand books on the street, with a caption similar to something like: “This is the same as pirating music and movies. If you don’t want to pay the artist or writer, you don’t deserve access to their work.” This reels had either tens or hundreds of thousands of likes.
I come from a world where I learned to “pirate” movies and music around the same time I learned to use a computer, around age 6. I would go on Zamunda, click on Bananas, type in Земята преди време, and watch. Then my sister would fill my MP3 player with Jonas Brothers and Miley Cyrus songs.
So this viral reel, along with half of the comments being in strong agreement with the statement, actually felt like a pop culture slap. I took it for granted that we, THE PEOPLE, could agree that “piracy” is a label slapped on peer-to-peer sharing networks in order to criminalize them. Yet lately, along with all the posts rightfully criticizing generative AI, Spotify, and other streaming platforms, another consumerist, anti-autonomous idea is riding the wave (the 10% to our 90%) - the idea that sharing media is not the fair thing to do, only buying media is. Whose interests does this serve?
It is not a conspiracy theory to believe big companies and powerful individuals partly control the narrative online; but even if they didn't, I think oversimplification of matters is an inherent component of short-form media. Whether it’s a corporate marketing strategy or organic cacophony, I find that boiling a point down to a sentence to create an attention-grabbing hook is sort of diabolical. I tried doing that for my reel and I could feel my brain squirming in protest. This Twitter-invented way of posting online is best suited for agitation, not truth searching. Sometimes the shortest, most concise explanation of something is long. And if we want to be more resistant to having our subjectivity restructured online, we need to stop scrolling through a 100 micro-thoughts every day.
…
Two weeks after unfollowing everyone, and consequently going a lot less on Instagram, I noted that I started struggling even more with derealisation and I suspected it had something to do with [quitting] Instagram. The psychological structure that allowed me to integrate large amounts of social media content into my life was faltering. I felt trapped in my small life with all the noise turned down. My existential anxiety was actually on the rise. This was not what the motivational Youtube videos were promising me.
The thing about deleting social media is that it doesn’t remove you from the reality of it. Social media has fundamentally reshaped society. The massive amount of resources, attention, and labour (mostly unpaid) that go in towards upkeeping those platforms would have otherwise been spent on offline social infrastructures. While offline spaces still exist, they are eroded. You can’t even go and do something weird in the park because you will be filmed and posted online. Life flows through the panopticon machines in our pockets. The dichotomy of “social media” and “real life” is not so distinctive anymore. It’s like trying to pull apart two plants that stayed in the same small pot together for too long without hurting their root systems - you can’t. As an ex-obsessive user, removing myself from social media felt like sacrificing parts of my life.
There isn’t necessarily a lush life waiting on the other side. I wish to see more people delete Instagram for this reason, even though it sounds like a counter-argument. You have to face your own reality. My partner taught me the term “prefigurative politics” which is a framework I have been using for a long time without knowing a term for it existed. To be prefigurative basically means to stop waiting for a future to arrive along with the perfect opportunity to start from scratch. It means to envision what world you want to live in and begin, to the best of your abilities, to enter those social dynamics now, to make those changes now. Deleting Instagram did not make me happier - although it might in the future - it made me lonely and a little bored. But it also gave me meaning and lucidity, which I value a lot more.
A few times while riding on public transport I snooped in people’s phones just a little. Most of them were scrolling FYP’s and reels. On my left, an old person was scrolling through an awful lot of military footage. On my right, a cute old lady was doing a sudoku with her brows furrowed. I tried not using my phone at all. It is surprisingly difficult and incredibly boring to ride a tram without any entertainment.
I aim to be bored more often now, and silence is a big part of that. Doing most things in silence feels like it should be the radical solution to the noise, but to me it isn’t. I want to return to singing while folding laundry and talking with friends and just not doing that many tasks alone to begin with. I want to return to muchness, not nothingness.
So after riding the train in absolute silence for a couple of weeks I’ve shifted onto using that time to go through my Photos app to delete whatever screenshots and photos I don’t want to keep, and listening to music from my Walkman. Joining the masses in the phone staring, but reformed and happy about it!
…
Three weeks in, I deleted Instagram from my mobile devices, but I still went on desktop, and occasionally reinstalled and uninstalled on mobile. I saw some improvements. Writing became easier. I began drafting this article, which was a miracle. I managed to feel properly grounded for like 20 minutes one day. But for the rest of the time I didn't feel any of the promised results of abstinence.
Until it was the last day of having Instagram.
I reinstalled Instagram on my iPad in order to share about my new blog and newsletter. After posting, I kept checking on my stories every hour or so. When I checked, each time I was immediately pulled to the reels and lost maybe 6-7 hours to Instagram that day. I let myself do that - one last doomscrolling session.
At around midnight I suddenly sensed that I had been feeling horrible for hours. I started crying very wet tears out of nowhere. Apparently I did get the promised results of abstinence - I just never noticed due to how gradually they returned to my body, how natural and neutral they felt. And when I plunged into Instagram with no limits it all hit me the way it hits a somewhat healthy brain: like a chemical tornado.
Action Steps
This year I have become very solution-oriented in my personal politics. I literally can’t read a news article about the worsening climate and biodiversity crisis if it doesn't end on an action point.
So I promised myself to end on action steps whenever it suits the topic. One of my next articles will be a more practical guide on how to actually delete social media after being on there for years. But for now here are 5 things you can do if you are not ready for that yet, but want to dip your toes in the water:
This one was a game changer for me: get a watch. Not a smart watch, just a plain watch that shows the time. Of all of the things I bought in order be on my phone less, this is my top one and it was the cheapest one. There are more things you can buy, such as an alarm clock, MP3 player, camera, dumb phone, etc, but I don’t think those solutions are affordable to everyone and I wouldn't want to give off the impression that you need to spend tons of money. You don’t.
Identify your why: why are you on social media? Simmer those reasons down to the top 3 needs the app soothes for you. Then come up with 1 offline thing you can try to satisfy each of those needs. Instead of focusing on technically optimising your digital life, focus on decentralising your digital life.
Watch and read things on the topic. Social media detox is a task of willpower and knowledge. Here are some of the videos and articles that I personally related to and felt motivated by: (Why Don’t I Feel Human Anymore?) (the chronically online will become a new underclass) (Social Media is Not Self Expression). I don’t entirely relate to every single point, but hearing other people share their thoughts and subjective experiences crystallised both what I agreed and disagreed with. If you live in a city with good bookshops and libraries, definitely check those out. And if you’re a rabbit, here’s a little hole for you: (every single are.na channel related to having a healthy and non-obsessive relationship to technology). Remember to stay picky! I do not vouch for those channels.
Allow yourself a back-and-forth: I deactivated and reactivated, installed and uninstalled for years. Whatever your goal is, social media dependency is very common and breaking free takes time. Don’t feel like you’re failing.
Find a detox buddy. I am lucky to have 2 people in my life which are also on a similar journey with Instagram. No matter how much you read about it online, you will probably feel more validated and understood by sharing with a friend. Everyone has different needs and ideas how to deal with their situation, so it’s useful to draw inspiration from one another. My way was to spend weeks on overhauling my entire internet presence. My partner has chosen to only have Instagram on desktop and they don’t mind checking it from time to time. One of my best friends went to an AA meeting to talk about their addiction, and switches between having it installed and uninstalled. Whatever your way is, together is better! <3
If you read this entire article, WOW and THANK YOU so much! It is my first ever article, and I hope my voice will grow stronger with time. If you have any thoughts or questions about it, I would be very excited to hear them, and you can reach out to me over here!
Love, Heavencult <3
aheavencult@gmail.com