I Quit Instagram For Two Years — Here’s 9 Things I Learned
The unexpected perks of living without social media.
The year was 2011.
A group of girls from my class were busy on their iPhone 4. Back then, people staring at their phones wasn’t an everyday sight.
“Aleid! Have you seen this?” The girls looked up from their phones and called me over.
They showed me Instagram.
At that time, only a few people from our school were using it, and I was about to become one of them.
They set up my account, took a picture of me, put a filter over it (probably Clarendon or Valencia), posted it on my profile, and gave it my first ‘likes.’
Over the next eight years, Instagram slowly turned from a casual platform with square pictures and tacky filters to a highly addicting app that would come to consume about 3–4 hours of my days.
Until I decided it was enough.
In December 2019, I left the platform, deleted the app, and never looked back. I didn’t anticipate that this decision would change my life so drastically.
And I was surprised in what way.
