My One Year Anniversary of Being Off Instagram and How it All Started

It all started on a drive last summer to a lake house with some friends. As we drove up and down hills like a rollercoaster ride through the country, passing barns and open fields, my husband sat in dull pain from a kidney stone that we prayed would soon pass. (A lithotripsy procedure a week later finally did the trick).

We started listening to an audiobook, The Opt-Out Family by Loechner, during the two-hour drive and I was blown away. I couldn’t get over the facts, the algorithms, the lives lost due to TicToc video challenges and Erin Loechner’s story. I deleted Instagram for the weekend and wanted a renewed motivation to have less time online and more self control.

One weekend off social media was so refreshing that I decided to hold off a few more days… then a week. A week turned into a few months, and a few months turned into a year.
Today marks one year off instagram. In the past, that’s something I never could have fathomed. I joined the platform when it came out in 2010 when I was in college and it seemed like the perfect combination of keeping in touch with friends and showing snippets of life through photography. When I logged on, it was only my friends’ photos and captions that I saw. It was a fun and convenient way to keep in touch with people from various summer camps I worked at or stay in touch when I lived across the world. People would log on, look at a few friend’s photos and simply close the app. That was that.

Now, more than 15 years later, a once simple way to connect with friends has turned into a lions den of dopamine addiction and algorithms that often takes us farther from those we love instead of closer.

Have I actually missed it? Not really…or at least, not enough to get back on.

Have I reached where I want to be with self-control and boundaries regarding all things phones? absolutely not. I have a long way to go. I want to dive deeper into the Opt-Out movement, The Hang Ten Movement, and other groups who strive to have low-tech families and introduce social media much later than is considered the norm these days.

Am I saying you need to get off social media too or that it’s all bad? no. I think it has to be a personal conviction but also should be more of a conversation. Especially as parents, we are role models for our children (whether positive or negative).

To quote Loechner, “It’s a lofty goal to boldly raise an opt-out kid, to design a family culture that is truly yours…that ensures you’ll know the people under your roof better than an Instagram ad does, to create a life that is so good and so abundant and so full that you won’t find yourself sneaking away from it to check your feeds. But I believe it’s possible to live a life that’s both full of love and empty of likes.”