Compulsive social media usage is now considered a behavioral addiction, similar to gambling. I have felt this addiction as well, but found comfort in knowing I could delete my account if it ever got too much. Well, last year the day came when I felt that the harm Instagram was causing my mental health was greater than the benefit, and so I decided to delete my account. After going through Instagram’s 16-step program, I received the following instructions: Wait 30 days without logging into your account for the deletion to be completed. Oh, and if you log in at any point, we will stop the deletion and reset the counter.
This was great, Sarp. Thank you. And the last line... oof.
I have hope; we've updated our mental model around agency before. America once had a universal assumption of free will / agency over one's eating decisions and this was exploited for selling diet programs and even entertaining audiences (e.g. The Biggest Loser which turned this exercise of free will into a competition; it feels like a fever dream that this show existed (for 17 seasons!?!)). I hope, in a similar way, we mature out of the idea that we all have free will /agency over our social media use.
On a separate note, I wanted to share the below quote by Jenny Odell (How to Do Nothing). I have it pinned to the top of my IG to remind me that every scroll is a high-stakes decision, even if the platform makes it feel trivial.
"We experience the externalities of the attention economy in little drips, so we tend to describe them with words of mild bemusement like "annoying" or "distracting." But this is a grave misreading of their nature. In the short term, distractions can keep us from doing the things we want to do. In the longer term, however, they can accumulate and keep us from living the lives we want to live, or, even worse, undermine our capacities for reflection and self-regulation, making it harder, in the words of Harry Frankfurt, to "want what we want to want." Thus there are deep ethical implications lurking here for freedom, wellbeing, and even the integrity of the self."
Thank you Kayla! Funny enough, this is not the first time I'm talking about the Biggest Loser and reality TV as it relates to social media! The Odell quote is fantastic, thank you for sharing. The "drops" in the bucket can easily fill the bucket if they're frequent enough...
Been a while since I deleted ig and found myself on substack. This was a great read, thank you!
Thank you! I have unfortunately come back to Instagram... Self discipline alone is not enough in such an asymmetric playing field.
It's funny, i purposely opened substack this morning instead of IG to keep from scrolling. Congrats on deleting ✨
There you go! Maybe Substack is the way out of IG! Thank you, it's actually pretty difficult 🤦
This was great, Sarp. Thank you. And the last line... oof.
I have hope; we've updated our mental model around agency before. America once had a universal assumption of free will / agency over one's eating decisions and this was exploited for selling diet programs and even entertaining audiences (e.g. The Biggest Loser which turned this exercise of free will into a competition; it feels like a fever dream that this show existed (for 17 seasons!?!)). I hope, in a similar way, we mature out of the idea that we all have free will /agency over our social media use.
On a separate note, I wanted to share the below quote by Jenny Odell (How to Do Nothing). I have it pinned to the top of my IG to remind me that every scroll is a high-stakes decision, even if the platform makes it feel trivial.
"We experience the externalities of the attention economy in little drips, so we tend to describe them with words of mild bemusement like "annoying" or "distracting." But this is a grave misreading of their nature. In the short term, distractions can keep us from doing the things we want to do. In the longer term, however, they can accumulate and keep us from living the lives we want to live, or, even worse, undermine our capacities for reflection and self-regulation, making it harder, in the words of Harry Frankfurt, to "want what we want to want." Thus there are deep ethical implications lurking here for freedom, wellbeing, and even the integrity of the self."
Thank you Kayla! Funny enough, this is not the first time I'm talking about the Biggest Loser and reality TV as it relates to social media! The Odell quote is fantastic, thank you for sharing. The "drops" in the bucket can easily fill the bucket if they're frequent enough...