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.

Another perfect day, another perfect breakfast for the ’gram (Farrah Storr)

Suddenly I no longer had that. You see just 24 hours earlier I had decided to end my 12-year relationship with Instagram. “Bye Instagram… it’s been (sort of) fun”, I wrote to my 29,0000 followers, only around 200 of whom I actually knew. And that was that. Over. I felt quite emotional. People I had never met, but who had followed me for years seemed genuinely upset. I was genuinely upset.

It was like calling time on a relationship that had once been so perfect – full of dignity and connection and watching blazing sunsets together. (Remember when Instagram’s original premise was simply posting beautiful pictures?) Now it felt like a terrible marriage – cold and demanding and yet, one you could never quite bring yourself to leave unless you did something dramatic like walking out in the middle of the night.

In the end, I left for so many reasons it’s difficult to list them all here. But basically I was tired. I was tired of sharing my life with thousands of strangers. I was tired of spending more time in my DMs than in some of my friendships. I was exhausted by trying to figure out an algorithm that made literally no sense to me. (If it’s so clever why is it constantly showing me videos of XL Bully dogs in Philadelphia?) I was sick of documenting everything – my outfit, my dog, what I was having for dinner.

Once upon a time, these would have been private images – something to pop in the photo album and share years down the line. That, or live their lives in a cardboard paper box that stays under the bed along with the rest of your ghosts

I hated the fact that every experience I had was interrupted by the thought: would this make a good Instagram post? I was so over taking pictures for the gram rather than as a keepsake for myself. I was bored by the vanity (my vanity); the complete lack of any real community and the gnawing sense I’d spent years tending to an audience that Mark Zuckerberg owned, not me.

It dawned on me that I have posted over 2,000 images of my life on Instagram. Scrolling through them all now is like watching one of those old home videos containing snatches of a life you once led. There are pictures of places I once lived; parties I once danced at; desks I once ruled from behind and colleagues I once knew.

Once upon a time, these would have been private images – something to pop in the photo album and share with friends and family years down the line. That, or live their lives in a cardboard paper box that stays under the bed along with the rest of your ghosts. They would be powerful memories that ignited a million different emotions. Your emotions. Not other people’s. And they would be richer emotions for not having been witnessed and dissected by the world. They would be real too – not stylised; not curated to fulfil some weird hashtag requirement. Who directs who, I often used to think. Does my life dictate “the gram” I show to the other world? Or does “the gram” dictate how I live my life? The answer made me feel deeply unsettled.

It’s a wonderful life (on the ’gram) – until it isn’t (Farrah Storr)

I’m not alone in these feelings by the way. People are fleeing the once-beloved app in their droves. Engagement rates are woefully down (30 per cent year on year in 2022, so who knows what now?). It’s true that many of us have simply outgrown a place that once felt like the best party on earth. That happens. I’m 45 now. I was 33 when I joined Instagram. The validation of others seemed so important back then – and Instagram was absolutely the easiest place to get it. But also Instagram has changed. Its rules of engagement are dictated by those who feel so completely alien to me – twenty-something influencers acting out fantasy lives; performing dogs and bench-pressing wellness junkies constantly posting their reels. These are not people I would spend time with in real life (okay, maybe the dogs) so why do I do it now?

I know I could have done what everyone else is doing and done a January digital detox. But I know myself – a detox only ever leads to wanting more of what you deny. And when you think about it, if you have to detox from something the acknowledgement is there in the very word – that it’s something inherently bad for you; something you can never escape unless you go cold turkey.

I was always a writer before I was a picture person anyway. The one thing I always did love about Instagram was its ability to connect me with other people around the world. So I write now – more than I have ever done. As a former editor of Elle and Cosmopolitan, it is so satisfying to get back to my first love and now as head of writer partnerships on Substack – a self-publishing platform – it made sense to produce my own weekly newsletter. My readers write back to me with long, thoughtful posts. Occasionally we meet up. It feels nourishing in a way posting pictures of my handbag never did nor ever could.

Discover Farrah’s newsletter- Things Worth Knowing