Bye bye Instagram – constantly showing off my ‘perfect’ life is just too exhausting

Farrah Storr will still make her own almond milk but with one big difference – she won’t be posting pictures of it on the social media platform that was once a must-have for any influencer. Here’s why...

No more time spent agonising snapping the most aesthetic pic – I’m glad (Farrah Storr)

This morning I made almond milk. I mean actually made it. I fed a bag of nuts through a cold press juicer, poured it into a beautiful ceramic mug et voila! Except the entire experience felt odd; unfinished almost. I felt jittery – like I’d forgotten something vital. You know when you leave the house and know you’ve left something on – the iron, the tap, something so significant that you question how you could ever have forgotten it in the first place? Well, that’s exactly how I felt.

And then it hit me – there was a missing sequence of actions that usually followed everything I did. Which is to say, grab my phone, position said mug under the gentle glow of a nearby lamp, snap it at least seven times, spend 10 agonising minutes eulogising about the joy to be found in milking your own nuts (pardon the phrasing) and then the coup de grace: posting it on Instagram.

What then followed would be a litany of likes and comments and emojis that quite frankly meant absolutely nothing to me, but which signalled I was a very clever girl for making my own breakfast. I would feel loved and liked and maybe, just maybe a little superior as complete strangers oohed and aahed over my artfully curated life. My pre-frontal cortex would go into dopamine overload and all felt good with the world – if only for a few minutes.