The one change that worked: I deleted Instagram – and embraced the joys of a truly private life

I’d become obsessed with appealing to my invisible audience.

But since I ditched the app a year ago, my quieter moments have taken on brilliant new meaning I first downloaded Instagram when I was 17 and became hooked on it the way most people fall in love: slowly, and then all at once.

For a long time, I never considered myself a social media addict.

I self-righteously refused to download TikTok, declared Snapchat to be for “children”, and posted less regularly on Instagram than half of the people I followed.

As I went through my university years, however, certain changes crept up on me.

I began to swap reading – or essay-writing – for hours spent curating new posts.

On my way home from lectures (or later, from my work as a journalist), I would spend ages trying to take the artsiest, most perfect picture of that evening’s sunset for my story – as if the people who followed me were eagerly awaiting yet another photo of one of the Earth’s rotations.

What usually followed was a night of reloading my feed to see how many people had reacted to my post – or worse, hadn’t reacted at all.

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