I Quit Instagram and Became Insufferable

Then it took me seven days to read four pages.

I stopped posting two years ago

No announcement, no goodbye post. I just stopped.

And then I decided I was magnificent.

That is the honest sequence. Within weeks I had built an entire personality out of it. I read. I make art. I am not competing with anyone, because I am not putting anything out for anyone to compete with. Solved. Thirty-odd years and I had quietly cracked it while everybody else was still choosing filters.

I still knew every conversation my friends were having. Every reference, every bit of drama. I had opted out and lost nothing.

That felt like proof.

Here is the part I still believe. My life does not need an audience. I do not need my bhua’s nanad’s daughter’s husband to know what I ate for dinner. Social media is where you market your holidays and post a family photo full of love on the birthday of someone you have not called in eleven months.

It is not lying. It is showing the half that photographs well.

And the rest of us measure our whole lives against somebody’s better half.

Then people started deciding my life was boring

It never comes to your face. It arrives as gentle pity. Nothing much happening with you, na. Two years without a post and the verdict is in.

Meanwhile I sit down with someone and I cannot stop talking. So much has happened. Pets, places, one very bad stretch, several unreasonably good months, things I learnt about myself that I would not have chosen to learn.

But apparently none of it happened. No evidence.

Except the people who matter know all of it.

My best friends know. My family knows. They got the bad stretch while it was happening, not as a caption three months later.

So there is a record. It is just smaller, and it is kept by people who were actually there. That is enough. It took me a while to believe that, and now I do.

Anyway. That was the smug part.

Then came the exhaustion

It took me seven days to read four pages of my favourite book. Four pages. I kept picking it up and not one sentence stayed.

So I looked at my day the way you look at a bank statement after a bad month.

Wake up—scroll. Getting ready—scroll. Breakfast—scroll. Kettle, lift, queue—scroll.

I had not opted out of anything. I had only stopped contributing. I was still there every hour, taking it all in.

The Anxious Generation says passive scrolling may be the worse half of it. When you post, at least you are doing something—competing, pushing back. When you only consume, it arrives unopposed. Millions of data points a day and a brain that was never built to sort them. So it does not sort them. It just gets tired.

Which explains the four pages.

It also explains the thing I have been avoiding writing down. My acne has bothered me more this year than it did at nineteen. My skin has not got worse. I have just looked at several thousand faces this year that do not have skin at all. Only surfaces.

I was not competing. I was still losing.

And if this is what it does to an adult who can still remember being bored, what does an over-consumed parent hand to a child? You cannot give someone an attention span you do not have.

What I am left with

I have not deleted anything. I do not have a system, and I am suspicious of people who announce one. Every rule I have set myself this year has lasted about nine days.

Bunzy did a binky this morning—a rabbit’s version of zoomies, a full mid-air twist for no reason at all—and it was the best thing I saw all week. I wanted to tell everybody. I do not need everybody to see it.

I got into a headstand last month, after a year of failing at it. Nobody saw that either.

So maybe my life looks boring from the outside. It is not. It is unposted, and those have quietly become the same word.

I read eleven pages yesterday.

Nobody knows that but me, and that turned out to be the point.