There’s a particular brand of loneliness that hits right after a breakup. Not the kind where you’re curled up crying into a pillow, listening to Sade (come on, Soldier of Love). I mean the kind that makes you question your entire sense of self.
It creeps in late at night, after you’ve binged a few shows while scrolling through your grid, looking at a life that doesn’t feel like yours anymore.
One minute you’re laughing with friends, almost convinced you’ve moved on. The next, you’re poring over old photos, wondering what happened. The grief isn’t linear. The need to be seen doesn’t wait for healing. And in that strange twilight of heartbreak and hyper-awareness, I found myself somewhere between wounded and luminous, addicted to both creating and consuming content.
Instagram had always been a place of expression: aesthetics, updates, humor—and yes, thirst traps. And it worked, for a while at least. I posted about my “cabin life” in Lake Arrowhead. I leaned into mountain aesthetics. I documented the rebuilding of a life. I wasn’t pretending to be okay. I was performing the possibility that I might be. And sometimes, for a few hours, that performance worked.
It wasn’t inauthentic. But it wasn’t whole, either.
That projection came with a cost: mixed messages. It signaled to the world that I didn’t need support when, in fact, I desperately did. There were moments of real joy, yes, but also collapse. I cried hard. I had ecstatic bursts of energy followed by days of dragging sorrow. That imbalance, that spiritual whiplash, was the real story.
But Instagram doesn’t do nuance. It just does highlights.
Somewhere between the validation and the curation, the cracks began to show. Especially after the breakup, when I was trying to move on, trying to heal, and still catching updates from the sidelines. I wasn’t stalking my ex. That wasn’t the issue. The issue was the phantom connectivity Instagram created. I stayed loosely tethered to people who weren’t meant to be in my life, nor I in theirs. I watched lives I no longer touched. I clung to scenes I no longer belonged to. Not out of malice or obsession, but because the feed made it feel like I was still part of something, even when I wasn’t.
Instagram made it easy to confuse attention for intimacy. To confuse curated snippets for relationships. And for a long time, I played along and I shared what I wanted to believe. I edited my life like a campaign. I posted from joy, sure. But also from grief, boredom, loneliness, and the ache of trying to be okay in a world that rewards the appearance of okayness.
It wasn’t some great unraveling of vanity that led me off Instagram. It was subtler than that. I started to realize that watching other people’s stories, reacting to their updates, keeping up with lives I wasn’t really part of—it left me unmoored. These weren’t real interactions. They were stand-ins. Pseudo-relationships my brain kept trying to file under “connection,” even though nothing about them felt grounded.
It wore on me, slowly, but completely. I was absorbing so much, yet retaining so little. Reels weren’t real.
And somewhere along the way, my feed stopped feeling like mine. It wasn’t just stories and friends anymore—it was ads. Constant ads. Suggested posts I didn’t ask for. And a steady drip of horrifying news, algorithmically designed to keep me angry, afraid, and scrolling. I don’t know the exact number, but it felt like at least a third of what I saw had nothing to do with my life. It turned something intimate into a billboard, a soapbox, a loop. Whatever presence I once felt there had been replaced by noise.
Eventually, the spark the algorithm once offered just faded. I stopped wanting to check in. I didn’t feel like posting. So one day, I just left.
Of course, I made it a little dramatic. Because… me. I posted a slide with a simple note: “After 14 years on this app, I’ve decided to take a break.”
Part of me didn’t want anyone to think I had blocked them. (The irony wasn’t lost on me.) A few people reached out. Some said, “Let’s stay in touch.” We tried, briefly. But most of those connections faded quickly, a strong indication they were already fading before I ever signed off. Some replies were more direct: “Gonna miss those abs.” I mean, I had a schtick.
What I’ve learned since stepping away is that the people who matter already know how to find you. The rest won’t even notice you’re gone. That’s not shade, it’s just scale. It’s the cost of broadcasting yourself to a world already overstimulated and under-connected.
Recently, I ran into someone I used to know through Instagram. We’d interacted for years with banter, reactions, shared glimpses of our lives. I remembered things about them. I was genuinely happy to see them. But when we talked, it felt like I was speaking to a stranger. There was a vacancy behind their eyes. A polite smile. That faint recognition you give someone whose name you can’t quite place.
They didn’t remember the things I thought we’d shared. And standing there, I realized: we hadn’t actually shared them. Not really.
We’d exchanged signals. We’d performed nearness. But the relationship lived entirely in the feed. And when the feed disappeared, so did the connection.
That moment sat heavy with me for days. Not because it hurt, but because it clarified. There are so many people I’ve carried in memory. People I met through digital proximity. People who once felt close. But I was carrying a version of them that didn’t exist anymore. Maybe never did.
Instagram didn’t fail me. It did exactly what it was designed to do. It kept me scrolling. It gave me just enough dopamine to stay. It created the illusion of closeness. The aesthetics of relationship. The soft hum of “presence.”
But real connection doesn’t hum. It shows up.
It’s a person remembering your birthday, or texting when you’ve gone quiet. It’s the friend who shows up at your door just because they had a feeling. (Yes, I know, for people in L.A., that sounds like a threat.)
Real connection is divine. And it’s worth our time.
That’s why I left. Not because I was angry or enlightened. But because I wanted to give more of myself to something rooted, something human. Maybe I’ll go back one day. But if I do, I’ll go back as a person, not as content.
At Coachella this year, I barely took any photos. I didn’t shoot videos. I wasn’t holding up my phone and I didn’t feel the need. DJ Pee .Wee (Anderson .Paak in an iconic wig) headlined the Neon Carnival with a live brass band that slapped an electrifying coat of color on every track. If you know, you know. A time was had.
And when the crowd sang Can We Talk—a thousand voices giving full 90s R&B lover boy energy to every word—I didn’t film it. I lived it.
The memory isn’t saved in some archive of old videos I’ll never see. It’s in my body.
Ditching Instagram was less about digital detox and more about presence. It was about what returns when the noise falls away. The silence isn’t empty, it’s full of everything we’d been drowning out. Your own breath, your own voice. The beat of something you can feel again.
One of my favorite albums last year was GNX. And Kendrick Lamar’s “tv off” plays constantly in my head. Not just because of his virtuosic layers. Because of the mirror. Kendrick asks us what we’re watching. Who we’re watching. And how entertainment, social media, the performance of presence—can become a barrier between us and the actual moment we’re in.
And it’s not just fun events we miss. It’s worse than that. We miss injustice. We scroll past cruelty. We let ourselves become complacent while the world comes undone, because the feed is still on. The slot machine still spins.
We’re overstimulated and under-attuned. We’ve built entire lives around avoiding the full weight of our own discomfort. The world is unraveling, and so are we. But we’ve mastered the art of muting both. One reel, one like, one scroll at a time.
And isn’t that exactly it?
When the feed is always on, you don’t notice how much of yourself you’ve muted. You don’t notice how much of your attention has been outsourced. Or how long it’s been since you felt meaning in your fingertips.
We’ve confused broadcasting for connection and learned to live in audience mode. We filter ourselves not just through apps, but through the imagined gaze of people we’ll never meet.
And somewhere along the way, we lose the rawness, the presence. The parts of life that don’t make sense in a caption.
I’m not above it and I’m not better than it. I might even find myself back on the grid someday. But if I do, it won’t be because I’m seeking or proving anything.
It’ll be because I have something to say. Something real. Something I want to share with people, not platforms.
Because in the end, being seen and heard is not the win.
It’s being present when no one’s watching.
Well said
so real as always 💯