i was addicted to instagram for about a month. it upended my life enough that i realized that i was living with something new-an undesirable habit. and once i realized this, it seemed like it would be wise to try to address it or at least think about it. easier said than done.

i left instagram for about three to four months cold turkey-i left a video saying i was leaving, then uninstalled the app.

there’s a few things to talk about here. first, as emily noted to me, this is why kids today can be so bitter about their relationships with their own phones. kids (which is anyone younger than 43) watch movies from the early 2000s with a kind of wistfulness because, wow, people lived normal, natural lives without phones. maybe it’s obvious to you, but when you’re 43, you completely grew up without phones. phones were an absolutely new thing that happened in the middle of your 43-year old’s life.

i grew up quite familiar with the state of being absolutely bored to the gills. boredom was just a sensation that you had, like pain or hunger. you’d stare in some direction and you’d be bored. but that doesn’t seem to be a thing i feel anymore. now it’s mostly about dealing with self-control and somehow thinking about it all the time. it is not relaxing. the phone is in your pocket. it’s on your body.

i hope i’m not using “addiction” in a way that trivializes it. some people (have to) deal with their own intense relationships with (substances, habits), and i would never want you to think that what i dealt with is the same as that.

obviously, so many forms of addiction have had an enormous impact on so many lives-upending them, transforming them, taking people from one direction (their wishes, dreams, circumstances) to a very opposite one.

i hope it’s clear i am more than sympathetic.

i developed a habit that would break my sleep in a specific way: i would get up at four a.m. and watch reels for about two to three hours.

what’s impressive about that is that two hours for a movie is nothing—it’s one movie. if i had been getting up in the middle of the night every night to watch superman, you’d think, “wow, this guy’s into superman.” i’d probably learn a lot of superman trivia that i could drop into regular conversation. maybe i’d wonder why i didn’t just do that after work as you could easily combine a nine-to-five job with an intense level of superman fandom.

but an instagram reel or any sort of short-form video…—really, “short-form” isn’t strong nor short enough of a word. six seconds isn’t short. it’s instant. it’s zero seconds. there is no difference between zero seconds and six seconds in any timeline unless you build atomic watches or run time.gov. if any clock in your house was off by six seconds, you wouldn’t spend any amount of time thinking about that. and yet this new art form can tell a story with multiple edits within a single six-second timeframe.

it’s an incredible achievement. who among us even knows if akira kurosawa could make a good six-second reel? (please don’t use a generative ai to generate 6 second akira kurosawa-styled tiktok videos, even if nothing could ever prevent you from doing this.)

ok but the six-second video format is extremely impressive from a narrative, storytelling, and comedy point of view. the art of editing has probably improved globally or developed some sort of new appendix, which i hope doesn’t metastasize into all moviemaking. but cutting your teeth on making a good six-second video must somehow give you incredible editing abilities. i totally get it as a training ground for filmmakers or anyone that’s into storytelling.

that’s the good part. the good part is the fun and addictive part—there are truly incredible videos out there, even though i am not going to link to them. if i told you the story of how heroin felt, i would probably not tell you where to get it. if you truly needed heroin (who needs heroin?), you’d be pursuing it anyway and would probably find your way to some heroin mart. but i hope you don’t do either heroin or short videos. the problem is, short videos are a lot harder to escape.

it was also so obvious to see that not every six-second video was good or seemed interesting to me. in that span of a few hours, i’d get a few—sometimes one, sometimes five, rarely 10—that were the funniest videos i had ever seen in my life. but that’s just a slot machine: you keep pressing the button like a rat and the button gives you drugs, but randomly, which is the worst/best kind of addiction-creating mechanism. it’s why inbox addiction is also a thing (that i have): never knowing when you’ll get an email, you keep reloading until you inevitably get one.

recently, i reinstalled instagram to post a video and a music video, then uninstalled it and reinstalled it and uninstalled it at least six times in the last week. unfortunately, the app felt just as good as before. i’m not sure if the algorithm got better—i understand that this is probably not what happened, and i was just missing it. but instagram knows me.

most of the videos it was offering were super bizarre, out-of-this-world noise performances where artists were setting instruments on fire, which appealed to me enormously. there were grandmas doing cooking and hip hop in mandarin, videos of religious sects with incredible sound and reverb—amazing soundscapes i had never seen before. all of this content came streaming back and it unfortunately felt really great.

during the period when i didn’t have the app, every alternative felt not as good. i tried to fill the place of the addictive cigarette with carrots, but carrots don’t (yet) contain nicotine, and you can taste the difference. i started reading the news again a lot—in a very “reload the news five times a day” kind of way.

the news didn’t feel as good, and going back to the news now still feels like a lesser version of the previous short video hole filling activity. news doesn’t know you as well as the algorithm. also it’s hard knowing that instagram is always there.

of course, the app also offers connection. there are multiple communities i joined or keep informed of or partake in or just watch, sometimes completely from a distance. but i can also strike up conversations, and i’ve been able to meet people from there. this isn’t saying anything new—online friendships have always been a thing, and those that cross from online to offline have been in my life for a while.

so instagram, like any social media app, combines addiction with everything else. addictive videos on one hand that fill holes, but those videos are also funny and original. they feel like a waste of time, but they’re also entertaining. you connect with people, but the messaging part is tied to the video part, and you can’t do one without the other. truly, any accidental ui swipe on instagram brings you back to reels—it’s the thing in the app with the most gravity.

emily pointed out two things regarding this. first, using instagram on desktop is enough of a deterrent for her. it lacks the slickness of mobile, so it has fewer addictive attributes. she would want just that, but minus the reels, which isn’t possible in the desktop version unless you install a browser extension and muck around.

second, she’s convinced that in some future some laws might pass (in europe?) to force apps like instagram to give you an option to turn off reels. this would probably take the form of family controls that make sense for parents and would integrate with other tools used to limit screen time. but for adults, of course, you’re on your own (adulting is hard). i’m not sure what the options are or could be. apps that try to limit screen time feel “ridiculous” knowing i could uninstall them, and i wouldn’t want an app i couldn’t uninstall. you/i could set a family screen time restriction, give the password to a friend, but then they’d be responsible for managing your/my emotions anytime you/i’d have a flare-up, which is so completely worse.

so here’s where i am today: i uninstalled the app and deleted it from my phone, as i’ve done dozens of times. then i went into my phone’s preferences and disabled the ability to install new apps and make in-app purchases.

so i’m just two very easy toggles away from reinstalling instagram and going back in. i’m also happy to share that i’ve actually created a calendar of things i do want to post, i.e. a social media content calendar! ((to be more intentional about when i use the app)) and i am looking forward to sharing that content because i think it might be funny, and someone might like it.

but! because of this, i already know that i’ll be turning those toggles off. and it will feel good again, and i’ll know that it’s not the right kind of good. and it will seem like that’s all there is to it, and that will also be not true.