I broke up with Instagram. Here’s how it changed my life. By Amelia Dinallo

Five months ago, I terminated a decade-long relationship with an intoxicating and mesmerizing, but undoubtedly unhealthy, partner: Instagram. And, as in the wake of all monumental breakups we know are for the best, I am trying, every day, to redefine who I am without my significant other.

Like most of my friends, I downloaded Instagram in fifth grade after convincing my parents that the app was necessary for my social success. I had, just months earlier, used the same logic to gain access to Snapchat, and years later, deployed it to get permission to join Facebook. Turns out that simple and pleading logic is too powerful a force for even two lawyer parents to rebut.

While I’m not proud of my 10-year-old self’s eagerness to follow the herd, I don’t know what my life would look like had my parents denied me. Since that triumphant day in fifth grade, almost every social milestone of my life has been laid in the realm of social media: The first time a boy ever asked me out, he did so via Snapchat; I received the invite for my first high school party through Facebook; when I got into college, my friends flooded their Instagram stories with congratulatory notes.

And social media was as implicated in my daily life as it was in the big moments. On any given day, Instagram told me what I needed to know to thrive socially, from who was celebrating a birthday to which political issue I should care about. When I got to college, making friends was easy — not because I’m extroverted, but because my classmates seemed to approach me with a degree of respect before I even introduced myself. In their eyes, my Instagram was cool, so naturally I must have been, too.

It’s no wonder then that for 10 years I would, without fail, lull myself to sleep by shuffling through my various social media feeds, only to coax myself eight or so hours later into a new day by brushing up on the new posts that had accumulated in my absence. I scrolled as I walked, as I ate, as I brushed my teeth. By the time I turned 20 last April, I had been online half as long as I had been alive.

Concern about the effects of my generation’s near-constant social media usage on our developing minds heightened last month when the?Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported ?that nearly three in five teenage girls felt persistent sadness and one in three seriously considered attempting suicide in 2021. This is the highest rate of sadness among teenagers in a decade, or precisely as long as my friends and I have been online.

Some professionals explain the positive correlation between worsening mental health and the rise of social media as a result of young people’s increased vulnerability to cyberbullying, while?others note ?that in substituting in-person socialization, smartphones enable isolation, particularly during the pandemic.

While these are undoubtedly poisonous effects of being exposed to social media early on in life, neither motivated my deletion of Instagram. I’ve never been cyberbullied and, while I felt the anxious loneliness of the pandemic, I had enjoyed a robust and fulfilling in-person social life before lockdown and have enjoyed one since.

Yet the C.D.C.’s data, particularly the disproportionate levels of sadness among teenage girls, didn’t surprise me. In my experience, it was my female friends and I — rarely the boys — who turned evenings out into photo shoots and morning debriefs into editing sessions, spending hours creating and tweaking content instead of pausing to actually process the moments we lived. Using social media in this invasive and personal way for an impressionable decade can make you feel far away from yourself — and from the person you hope to be.

As I reached my 20th birthday last year, and transitioned from my socially charged teenage years into adulthood, I was gifted with a smugly appropriate welcome present: job recruitment. And with it, I became acutely aware of an unspoken truth I had long known in the abstract: Unless you’re pursuing a career path in social media, most employers, colleagues and clients don’t care about your Instagram. They care about skills, attitude and experience, and they value you based on your ability — not only to speak to your interests, but also to have them in the first place.

For years, I had intuited that my hours spent mindlessly scrolling weren’t aiding me in becoming a more interesting, productive person. But I stifled my intuition, eager for approval in the teenage court of public opinion, in both its analog and digital form. Yet as visions of adulthood and its priorities, like finding a potential career, continued to spring up, I was faced for the first time with a set of inward-looking questions that my trusty social media cheat sheet — clogged with once-helpful information about friends of friends of acquaintances — could no longer answer for me.

So, with a steady hand, I long-pressed the Instagram app icon on my phone, watched it shake and said goodbye to one of the oldest, most all-encompassing relationships in my life.

In the absence of the ephemeral noise that usually filled my days, I was greeted, for the first time in 10 years, by an uncharted quiet. No longer could I rely on my feed to tell me what and whom to care about. If I wanted to know more about a topic, I had to research it; if I wanted to be reminded of a friend’s birthday, I had to remember to put the date in my calendar.

Actively pursuing my interests and nurturing my relationships took concentrated effort and time, but seeking out and reading a well-reasoned article or calling a friend on their special day instilled in me a sense of pride and satisfaction that using Instagram never once offered.

And deleting Instagram didn’t just spur me into a proactive, rather than a reactive, existence. It also relieved me of a burden its peers never imposed: producing content of my own.

A few weeks into my Instagram departure, I went to an exhibition opening at one of my favorite neighborhood art galleries. While I was there, a woman around my age (21 in 13 days, but who’s counting?) entered the building, snapped a picture of the most famous piece and immediately walked out. It was only then that I realized I had been in the room for 30 minutes and hadn’t thought to even take my phone out of my pocket.

I paused, reflecting on my newfound ability to be present. Before deleting Instagram, I, like my fleeting companion, would have prioritized recording the moment over living it — distilling the value of my afternoon down to my ability to create a well-curated post. After a decade of usage, I had grown addicted, not only to consuming content, but also to producing it for others.

Without evidence of being in the gallery, or an account to document my excursion, I stood alone, less lonely than I had felt in years.

I still take pictures, I still wish my friends happy birthday, I still read the news. But now when I do so, it’s a result of my own volition. And, as I round out my 20th year, I am proud to say that I feel more connected to my desires, passions and friendships than I have before since fifth grade.

Amelia Dinallo is a junior at Duke, where she is majoring in economics with a concentration in finance.