A Breakup Letter To Instagram
Dear Instagram,
At first, I resisted you.
To be honest, you weren’t even on my radar. I was busy living my life and did not have time to scroll another social media platform. But then I started a small business, and out of a sense of scarcity - and frankly desperation- to grasp and claw for some relevance in the attention economy, I answered your siren song and embarked on a good faith effort to make it work between us.
But after two years of giving in to the chorus of “you HAVE to be on Instagram to be relevant,” it has become clear to me that the hustle to promote my work on your shiny, vast, overwhelming, and endless scroll is not worth it.
In May I had knee surgery and told you I needed to take a break to get quiet and heal. Wow was it humbling and eye-opening to come to terms with how easily I had allowed you to colonize my mind! How acclimated I had become to the habit of harvesting my points-of-view, original ideas, and experiences as “content” to shovel into your insatiable maw. My friend Mehret calls this “screaming into the void,” and she is spot on.
During our separation Instagram, the trance lifted, and I was like “what the hell am doing on social media trying to persuade people to spend less time on social media?” My thoughts are not commodities. I don’t need your validation that my ideas or endeavors are worthy of likes or shares. And you know what? I didn’t miss you. Not really. In fact, I felt a deep sense of dread when I considered returning to your digital realm of hungry ghosts.
I am so done spending hours and hours of unpaid labor to prop up the illusion that you are anything but a data mining and advertising platform. I will no longer hock my ideas and original writing on a rented platform owned by your daddy Mark Zuckerberg. My thoughts and life are not “content” to feed your machine.
Screen Time Lifeline is a teeny tiny business, and I have yet to see any solid data demonstrating that the investment of time and money spent hustling away on your platform yields any real value for those of us with limited resources. The algorithms are not in our favor. How clever (and diabolical) of you to leverage one of the biggest myths of capitalism: that anyone can “make it” in the system that’s already rigged against them.
And while it’s true that I have made some incredible friends in your world – people I will be in touch with long after you succumb to the next hot platform - you have created a transactional environment that caused me to constantly question: are we liking and commenting on posts out of genuine interest, because we want something in return, or are we just mindlessly “engaging our followers” like good little entrepreneurs?
I want to be truly engaged with my friends, my family, my partner, my son, my work and my passions. Every moment I spend scrolling away in your shiny universe, looking for hollow validation, robs me of the time to do that.
You promised to expand my world Instagram. But instead, you shrunk it down to tiny squares on a screen. So, we are done. I’m breaking up with you.
I will not spend one more minute of my life trying to outsmart your algorithm.
I will no longer grind away at the unpaid mental and emotional labor and busywork required to get traction in your maze of posts, stories and now reels. What next? How much more of my time do you need?
I will write, talk and live based on my gut, heart and soul, not on what might be appealing to followers or “on brand.”
In fact, I reject being labeled a brand. Brands are for toothpaste, cars, and shoes. Not for humans.
I will never again use a fucking hashtag.
I know it won’t be easy. Many of my friends are truly alarmed and almost offended at my choice to leave you - even afraid for me. Is this vicarious FOMO? I guess we’ll see. Maybe I am committing some kind of marketing suicide.
One thing I know for sure: if Screen Time Lifeline is not a viable business without Instagram then it’s not a sustainable endeavor for me. I do have faith though, that my work speaks for itself, and I will continue to build community through my newsletter, word of mouth, and good old-fashioned human-to-human outreach.
I know that I myself will feel FOMO after we part. And that is won’t always be easy to stay away. I may come back now and again out of habit, fear or curiosity. Maybe event to post about an event I’m hosting. But not for long. Because I’m on to you and I’m taking my life back.
Bye Now,
Christina
P.S. If you’ve read this far, thank you! I invite you to join my mailing list for occasional musings and updates on retreats and events. I won't spam you, or share your data. Let's start supporting small businesses on platforms they own!