February 2024
The beginning of the end began while I was having breakfast with some friends at the local Lagkagehuset around this time last year. The morning had (d)evolved into a pretty standard Instagram meme-swapping session, and a good friend of mine eventually reached one from his saved posts folder which elicited a fateful reaction in me. It honestly wasn’t even that much more cringe/funny/gen-Z brainrot-inducing than some of the others we had seen that morning. By now I don’t even remember the content of the meme. But when the video had finished playing, I grimaced, shook my head, and joked that I would be deleting my account later that day. We shared a lmao and continued chatting.
But by the time I had finished biking home through the slow fog, I had decided that this was actually as good a time as any to follow through with my long-term goal of ditching social media.
Rest in peace, Sam’s Instagram page: 2013—2024. You are not really missed, but sometimes you are. It’s complicated. That’s why I’m writing this.
(I do feel bad about the fact that I had just exchanged follows with another acquaintance at the breakfast, and that I had accepted his follow request mere minutes before deleting my account. If you’re reading this, it was nothing personal.)
I had ditched Twitter long before Musk’s takeover, and I’d been off Facebook since before I even moved to Europe. Instagram was essentially the last thing keeping me in loose but constant ‘contact’ with a reasonably large cloud of people: uni and school friends, assorted acquaintances from parties/bars/Tinder/the wider internet, the occasional favourite music artist, and a handful of even more tenuous connections.
The word ‘contact’ is used generously here. I suspect most people my age who spent their mid-teens to mid-twenties using Instagram will know what I mean. It was really just a background hum of social interactions, which I became convinced is not such a good thing. I found it tricked my brain into thinking I was keeping up with an old friend simply because I saw him post a story of a cool lunch he had yesterday. Sometimes seeing these posts and reacting to them provides a good opportunity to reach out to them again. And sometimes this would give an opportunity to chat properly, catch up, and maybe even make plans in the real world. But I can count on one hand the number of times that would happen each month, and when I sat down and compared it to the number of times doomscrolling had lead me down rabbit holes which made my month measurably worse, the path forward became pretty clear.
It’s entirely possible that I’m the exception and that the majority of Instagram users are able to use it without falling into endless wells of silly content to little social gain.
Whatever the general trend is, the system just wasn’t working for me. It’s what it’s, as they say.
The takeout
Some of the final messages I sent out were to those whose numbers I didn’t have. Once they had sent them, I began the takeout process: downloading all of my data from the accounts page.
I’m a bit of an archivist when it comes to these sorts of things. It is often very amusing to be able to look back and see what sort of messages my friends and I were sending each other on BlackBerry Messenger in 2011, and who knows whether future Sam will think the same thing about Instagram messages from 2021.
The process itself didn’t take very long, and I was soon sent a zipped archive of everything I’d ever done on Instagram: stories shared, posts posted, likes, saves, adverts I’d reported as not relevant or annoying, embarrassing and failed direct message conversation starters… It’s really all there. And it’s like, 100MB all told.
After doing some random checks on the archive, I proceeded with the deletion. Instagram gives you a few day’s grace period in case you change your mind. Luckily, I remained steadfast in my convictions, and the account passed quietly in its sleep without any attempts at revival.
February 2025
I guess this section serves as a little bit of an update, in case anyone from my Instagram circles stumbles into this blog. If so, welcome! Remember to subscribe (via RSS, that is).
The year since has been pretty good. I did lots of maths, travelled to the US for the first time, attended excellent summer schools and conferences around Europe, made good friends here in Odense, visited home for Christmas, and got back into gymming and meal-prepping.
In the months that followed the deletion my productivity and overall mood saw a small but noticeable boost. Sometimes, I’d go days without thinking about Instagram at all, and becoming aware of this fact was always a nice little surprise.
But alongside these came realisations that I had not thought about particular old friends of mine for weeks at a time. If you’ve never used social media then this surely seems quite natural, but the background radiation of constantly seeing everyone’s posts — and even usernames — meant I thought about almost everyone at least once every few days. Oddly enough there was even some guilt associated with these recollections, as if I felt I was being a bad friend for not keeping up with what lunches they had been eating lately. For a while I brushed this off as social media withdrawal symptoms, but the obvious answer is that my brain is telling me to reconnect manually! Listening to these instructions is one of my 2025 resolutions.
TL;DR: Sorry for vanishing. I’ll text (many of) you guys soon.
Photos!
Here’s one photo from each month since, because why not.
February 2024
Here’s Copenhill peering out over the waters of Kastellet. I was in Copenhagen that morning for my US visa interview, which took about a minute and a half.
March 2024
New York! I went to the Simons Center for their yearly meeting about low-dimensional topology. It was big fun.
April 2024
Spring evenings in Odense are some of my favourites.
May 2024
One of my most treasured moments from my time in Europe so far. I didn’t even need to leave my garden to see them.
June 2024
On Constitution Day I decided to cycle to Kerteminde, and even though the headwind on the way back nearly killed me, it was a lovely time.
July 2024
10pm sunsets from trains are something else.
August 2024
I spent four weeks at the Les Houches School where I learnt about quantum geometry and hiked. A lot.
September 2024
Chile is a great place to visit in September, for several reasons. Maybe I’ll do a “Notes on Chile” post some day.
October 2024
I got this picture during the 15 seconds of autumn.
November 2024
The train rides to and from Stockholm were amazing; I started and finished Death’s End during the journeying that weekend. Stockholm was also pretty.
December 2024
There are two hippos somewhere in this image.
January 2025
I also went to the Swiss Alps again later in January for a conference, but Cape Town is just too pretty to not be January’s image.
