I Grew Up (Mostly) Analog
But I was not immune to the ills of social media (1 of 3)
This is the first installment of a three part series in which I chronicle the story of my online life, particularly as it pertains to Instagram. As I share in the first paragraph below, I have permanently deleted my Instagram.
To some, this is not a big deal. For me, it is a massive shift that’s been years in the making. Many people I respect no longer have the social media platform, or similar apps like it. If you are one of those people, some of the personal revelations below may come as no surprise. Or, they might be completely irrelevant to the slew of reasons to boycott Meta.
Some of you reading this might still be using various social media platforms. If that is the case, I hope that my series is thought-provoking to you. However, you should also know that my own struggles and mindset might not reflect yours. In that case, as my dad used to say, “If the shoe fits, wear it.”
In this series, I write particularly about Instagram. While I still have Facebook, I do not find it nearly as addictive or detrimental to my heart and mind. I also had a Snapchat once upon a time, but deleted it after Instagram copied it. Why have two apps when you can have one? I’ve never used TikTok. I used X, formerly Twitter, briefly during college. I have Marco Polo, and forget to check it or use it. Instagram, it turned out, was my mainstay social media and the platform that became my Achilles heel.
Finally, this narrative only captures my most deeply personal reasons for leaving Instagram. I have many other principled reasons that did not fit here and ultimately were not the deciding factors in my exit. If you’re interested, I briefly mention those other reasons in Part 2 and I would be happy to dialogue about those elsewhere.
Sometime last week, my Instagram account was permanently deactivated. All of my posts, my archives, my virtual presence were erased from that social media platform. I did not simply delete the app from my iPhone; I deleted myself from the app.
I had an Instagram account for a little over ten years. I started one in the fall of 2013. I was a junior in college, and my parents had just purchased for me my first-ever smart phone, a yellow iPhone 5C. My early posts included grainy selfies, saturated nature pics, and latte art. One of my friends recently texted me that she had found an old Instagram post of hers from back in the day: a group of pigeons on the sidewalk.
This is what Instagram used to be: upload an arbitrary or simple picture to throw a one-and-done filter on a photo — a filter so obvious that there was no question of whether or not it was airbrushed — and write a quippy or short caption to describe it. Some of my photographer friends posted legitimate works of art; most of us posted selfies in our cat t-shirts and polos.
Instagram was an afterthought, not a primary way of projecting our self-image out into the world. The most harmful consequences of having an Instagram, at the time, were using it to procrastinate writing an essay for class, and spying on what friends were up to in order to figure out who was about to start dating and who didn’t invite you to a recent party. Little did we know where we were headed. I’m sure some smart, forward-thinking people could have predicted it. I was not one of them.
While many of my friends had iPhones and Instagrams in high school, I did not develop a debilitating scrolling habit until I was 20, due to the fact that my first cellphone was a mini pay-as-you-go and my second was a sliding keyboard phone. I used these to text and call my friends.
I’m sure I was envious of my high school friends, but I don’t have many memories of being too bothered or having too much FOMO. Not enough of them had online lives beyond Facebook. Due to the simplicity of those social media platforms at the time, I did not feel overly jealous or left out. Relationships were still happening primarily in person.
When I was in high school, and even into my early college years, I was happy enough to send old school friend requests on Facebook and look at photos of them there. I could get in touch with people to make plans and that’s what mattered the most.
Looking back, I’m quite proud of myself that I navigated New York City without Maps on phone directing my every which way. Sure, I occasionally spent an extra $2.50 on my Metro pass because I entered the train station on the wrong side, having only written instructions on a post it note from looking up directions on my laptop at home. But I learned to have a strong sense of the city grid and how to get where I was going based on the street signs at the corner and other landmarks like the Empire State Building.
I spent the first 20 years of my life essentially in an analog world. I took notes on paper in my classes throughout college, I texted and called friends on a bulky phone to make plans to meet up, I had a Facebook to stalk my crushes, and I listened to CDs on repeat, burning mixtapes for my friends with songs I purchased on iTunes (or downloaded from other mixtapes). I read lots of books in my spare time. The only show I was streamed in high school was Glee on my dad’s laptop, since I usually missed episodes on air. My freshman college roommate introduced me to The Office and let me sign in to her Netflix account to watch it in the evenings. I never played video or computer games and had absolutely no interest in them.
It’s this kind of analog life that Freya India, a breakout Gen Z blogger and writer, recently wrote about in a piece called “A Time We Never Knew.” In it, she describes a sense of nostalgia that her peers have for a time without smartphones and social media. She says that they are all longing for essentially the 90’s, the decade before their birth, when life and relationships were built on anything but an Instagram profile or Snapchats:
There were hard times, of course—the ‘90s weren’t all bliss; no era is. But the world we inhabit now is so markedly different. New technologies cheapen and undermine every basic human value. Friendship, family, love, self-worth—all have been recast and commodified by the new digital world: by constant connectivity, by apps and algorithms, by increasingly solitary platforms and video games. I watch these ‘90s videos, and I have the overwhelming sense that something has been lost. Something communal, something joyous, something simple.
When I look back at, I’m grateful that my parents held out on technology for me. I’m grateful that the analog experience of the 90’s extended into the aughts, and that, for the most part, my formative years were spent off-screen.
Freya juxtaposes my experience with that of her generation:
I am grieving that giddy excitement over waiting for and playing a new vinyl for the first time, when now we instantly stream songs on YouTube, use Spotify with no waiting, and skip impatiently through new albums. I am grieving the anticipation of going to the movies, when all I’ve ever known is Netflix on demand and spoilers, and struggling to sit through a entire film. I am grieving simple joys—reading a magazine; playing a board game; hitting a swing-ball for hours—where now even split-screen TikToks, where two videos play at the same time, don’t satisfy our insatiable, miserable need to be entertained. I even have a sense of loss for experiencing tragic news––a moment in world history––without being drenched in endless opinions online. I am homesick for a time when something horrific happened in the world, and instead of immediately opening Twitter, people held each other. A time of more shared feeling, and less frantic analyzing. A time of being both disconnected but supremely connected.
When I read those contrasting examples of two different ways of life, I’m grateful that I was born in 1993. I remember sitting patiently while re-winding a VHS tape to watch it for the nth time. I remember my first CD that my dad gave me, Carol King’s Tapestry, and listening to it on my Walkman on road trips. I remember spending hours outside with my neighbor friends, playing pretend or kickball. In the evenings, my family played board games or sat on our living room couches and read our books silently but communally. We also watch The Princess Bride and Pirates of the Caribbean regularly. I even remember where I was when I heard about 9/11, leaving school early, and sitting in front of the television watching the Twin Towers fall on news replays. There was no Facebook, Twitter, even Substack to turn to.
Still, my analog life began to slip away, slowly but surely. It started with that shared Netflix account my freshman year of college and snowballed into using a smartphone during my junior year — I needed to check my email on the go! — and forming all the other digital habits that come with owning one.
And yet, one might assume that, even as I began to adapt the new technologies into my life, my analog upbringing would prevail. That I would be immune to the temptations of the digital world, and my armor against it would hold up. That I wouldn’t experience what Freya describes below and wouldn’t need to take drastic measures today in order to recover:
Most of us never knew falling in love without swiping and subscription models. We never knew having a first kiss without having watched PornHub first. We never knew flirting and romance before it became sending DMs or reacting to Snapchat stories with flame emojis. We never knew friendship before it became keeping up a Snapstreak or using each other like props to look popular on Instagram. And the freedom—we never felt the freedom to grow up clumsily; to be young and dumb and make stupid mistakes without fear of it being posted online. Or the freedom to be unavailable, to disconnect for a while without the pressure of Read Receipts and Last Active statuses. We never knew a childhood spent chasing experiences and risks and independence instead of chasing stupid likes on a screen. Never knew life without documenting and marketing and obsessively analyzing it as we went.
That assumption, that I would be immune, is wrong. Because I grew up with email and Facebook, which formed me and set me up to fall for the temptations of Instagram — and Snapchat and dating apps and documenting and marketing myself — later in life.
This is Part 1 of a three part series about my online life, and what led me to permanently delete my Instagram. If you aren’t yet subscribed, you can do so below to get parts 2 and 3 directly to your inbox! Thank you for reading Now We See Dimly.
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I love reading posts like these. How we navigate the digital/social media world in a healthy way is something that takes up a lot of my brain space these days, primarily for myself, but also thinking about my kids and what sort of world they'll be headed into. Freya's post, which I also found super interesting and really insightful, made me realise that I have been given the gift of experiencing the analog world (born in 1989) and I can choose to purposefully treasure and curate some of the valuable ways of life we experienced then (though of course, they weren't all valuable!), and pass those on. Do you read any of Ruth Gaskovski's writing? She writes a lot about living an analog life: schooloftheunconformed.substack.com