Why I'm quitting Instagram
(and moving to Substack)
Confession: I have an unhealthy relationship with consumption
What! An eating disorder, you say? Or perhaps a secret shopping addiction? But of course, this post has “Instagram” in the title. So let’s dive into my Instagram problem, and the alternative vision I have for a healthy lifestyle when it comes to information consumption.
TLDR: Going forward, I’ll be sharing my story and projects once a week in a newsletter format, rather than on Instagram. If this is content you enjoy, subscribe and you will receive my weekly posts direct to your inbox.
Yo-yo dieting on information
Here’s the backstory and the reasoning behind why I’m doing this.
Over the years, I’ve noticed myself interacting with Instagram in a way that is very similar to a yo-yo dieter trying to lose weight. And it’s not only Instagram - at one point or another, my drug of choice has been Facebook, 9gag, Reddit, Youtube, Twitter, and even the comments on CBC articles.
We’ve all been there: you open your phone for a very specific task - maybe to pick a restaurant for meeting up with a friend - and the next thing you know <insert addictive app of your choice> is open and you’ve been aimlessly scrolling for half an hour, until you realize you haven’t even looked up the restaurant yet.
Then, in a fit of pique after a particularly bad day of scrolling, you delete the app and swear never to open it again.
Yet somehow, after a week or maybe 3 weeks, the rationalizing starts up. “I’ll just open it on desktop”, then “I’ll re-add the app so I can check updates from my friends, then immediately delete it”, or “I’ve been so good, I deserve to reward myself a little bit”.
Once you’ve conceded to the desire, the cycle starts over, with usage slowly increasing until you’ve had enough of it all and quit again.
Like somebody who is trying to lose weight, I’ll go on an informational ‘diet’ that in reality is probably too restrictive. Then, as soon as the ‘diet’ is over, the old unhealthy habits come rushing back, and along with it the metaphorical mental weight gain.
Dieting vs. A healthy lifestyle
Like food, we have to interact with information whether we like it or not.
Our habits - around food, exercise, socializing, and information - all add up to form a lifestyle.
I consider myself to have a fairly healthy lifestyle with regards to food and exercise. However, it was only recently that I made the connection that it is equally important to be creating similar habits around informational consumption.
The problem is that most social media sites are designed to be aggressively habit forming - look up the research studies and articles written about the “variable reward mechanism” and you’ll see that this stuff goes to the bottom of our brain stems.
This makes it almost impossible (for me at least) to try to set boundaries around using an algorithm-based social media site such as Instagram.
The solution I’ve come up with is to identify the core needs that the social media is filling, and then provide myself a less-addictive substitution that I can work into my habits in order to build a healthy lifestyle!
My three core needs
For me, these are the three core reasons that keep me coming back to social media websites:
Daily News
Updates from family and friends
Sharing my story and projects
Let’s talk about the alternatives I’ve come up with to meet my needs.
Core need: Daily News
When it comes to the news, I’m not too concerned with hearing about major events the moment they occur. I have a subscription to the Economist, and they send a daily e-mail that summarizes the big world events. For a more Canadian flavour, The Globe and Mail has a free morning newsletter that summarizes the main Canadian stories. There’s a lot of overlap between these two morning emails, so in the future I do not plan on renewing the Economist subscription.
Lifestyle habit: read the news update email on weekdays at lunch.
Core need: Updates from family and friends
I’ll be honest - most people I know have drastically dropped back from sharing their lives on Instagram these days. Most of the posts I see on my feed are promotions and attention grabbing stuff fed to me by the algorithm. If I go directly to a friend’s page, their last post is often from months ago.
The much better alternative for me is real-time interactions. A phone call or an in-person visit is so much more meaningful anyways.
Lifestyle habit: phone calls on Sunday, Monday, and Thursday evenings with friends and family.
Lifestyle habit: soccer Friday nights with friends!
Core need: Sharing my story and projects
If you’ve followed me on Instagram, you’ll know that I love documenting my sewing projects and other creative endeavours.
I get a lot of satisfaction from sharing my process, as well as creating an archive for looking back on past work, or to reference how something was done.
This brings us all the way back around to why we’re here on Substack now.
It’s definitely more effort to write a blog post about my projects, but I think ultimately, it will be more meaningful.
Lifestyle habit: write and publish a blog post once a week on Saturday or Sunday morning.
Thank you for being here.
Maybe this post resonated with you. At any rate, thank you for giving me some of your time! If you would like to receive my weekly updates, Subscribe and you will receive an e-mail every weekend with my latest post.
It seems a little drastic and high effort, but based on my phone usage statistics, taking even 3 hours to write a blog post on the weekend will give me back hours of my life that is currently being taken up by social media.
Have you been considering alternatives to social media lately? Have a blog or want to start one? Let me know in the comments and I would love to follow you! (In a healthy lifestyle habit time slot, of course).