abandoning the algorithm
i deactivated my instagram account a few weeks ago. i don't know exactly how much time has passed, i'm not worried with keeping track.
my first concern when thinking about deactivating was how i would keep track of my friends' lives. they're living all over the country, some of them living abroad, and we don't talk much despite being close. i'm no longer good at keeping conversation going over text, i hate being on my phone too much and, to my surprise, find myself preferring phone calls - which is ironic, since i used to despise them so much i'd rather throw my phone out the window than answer when it rang.
would i miss flipping through their story posts, or leaving a like on their newly posted photo dump? after analyzing my behaviour on instagram for a few days, i realised i wasn't really paying attention to what my friends were posting. in a couple of days, i wouldn't be able to tell what friends were doing, or what they ranted or raved about on their close friends. actually, most of my time was (badly) spent on reels - which i would turn to whenever i felt bored, whenever i was waiting for the microwave to finish heating up a cold cup of coffee, waiting for my flatmate to sit down to watch a movie with me or simply waiting for the elevator.
i needed to stop scrolling. i wasn't paying enough attention to anything. if i want to know what my friends are up to, i can just message them, schedule a phone call, tell them to send me pictures of their latest adventures. isn't that what we used to do as kids, anyways?
my second concern was the pictures and videos i no longer have saved on my phone, and all the memories from my archived posts and stories. i had two options: exporting everything, or just deactivating my account instead of deleting. i went with the latter, mostly because i was afraid of regretting deleting my account.
now, allow me to go off on a tangent for a brief moment. almost three years ago i was robbed and lost my phone. one and a half years of photos, which i wrongly believed were already backed up to my cloud, were gone. some important moments of my life now are memories posted on archived instagram photo dumps. ironically, just last week i decided to download everything i had on the cloud, since alongside trying to reduce my screen time i'm also trying to degoogle my life. for seemingly no reason at all, my pc deleted everything. ten years of photos, videos and digital art gone from their designated folders, from my recently deleted and from my cloud, all at once. i managed to recover some of it with this software, but most of it is gone forever. it's like instagram tried to punish me for our divorce.
despite everything, i don't even remember instagram exists nowadays. if i need it to open a link someone sent me, or to check information about, say, a restaurant i want try, i can just open it on my pc, where i have my mostly unused professional account logged.
maybe one day i'll want to reactivate, or make a second account to follow friends and family. but, for now, it feels like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders.