Replacing Instagram with Grass
I caught myself spending too many hours on Instagram over the last three months, and I don't like that. It reminds me of the Twitter addiction I had in the early 2020s, one that I survived from and now I barely have more than 5 minutes of activity (which is still annoying, but better than two or three hours of wasting my mental health). Another reason I stopped using Twitter was the fact that Elon Musk somehow found a way to butcher the ecosystem of it and turned it into a child-porn-hate-speech-neo-nazi platform that you can't escape, AI slop, and bots spamming every single tweet. Still, while I deleted my public and active account back then, I made a fake private one to find the best content creators in the world (aka, those who pirate less-famous movies and share links with us Iranians who were always sanctioned by the world in any possible way). I check that app much less than before, something that I'm very proud of, and now, I hope I can do the same with Instagram.
Truth be told, Instagram is an interesting app at its core. I love photography, and I love having a digital gallery where I can share the pics I take from the places I've been or people I've met. I used to have a professional (?) account where I was posting my works as a journalist when I was in Iran, and after a while, I became less and less interested in doing that, and as a result, I deleted that account from the face of the earth, pivoting to a less obscure and intimate private account that only my friends have. Unfortunately, after four years of being active there, I feel less in touch and more negative towards the existence of myself on Instagram, and I have three reasons for that:
Mark Zuckerberg is a bitch. I'm getting ads after every story or post, which is annoying as hell. I feel like I'm experiencing YouTube BS, but more annoyingly, I don't like it. Let alone the fact that Zuck and co have huge censorship on the content that is against certain ideologies that are getting worse. I hate it when ads and ideologies are shoved down my mouth and Instagram is not helping to reduce that sentiment.
Instagram is too vital in human interactions. Look, I love my friends, and that's for sure, but I hate that some of my friendships have turned into "oh look, I sent you 20 reels today so we're still friends". I'm glad that I can still be updated about what my friends are doing or where they travel to, but if my visual knowledge is enough for our friendship, sorry, but we ain't friends, I guess. Also, I really liked it when people used to exchange phone numbers after meeting each other, not their Instagram. Even though I assume initiating a conversation based on someone's story is much easier than sending a single text message or shooting in the dark, the oversimplification of initial contact is a bit tragic.
Instagram is dumbing down everything. I don't like McDonald's because it's not real food. It's more like the illusion of what food is. A lot of "political content" on Instagram is just the illusion of what is political or social commentary. I care about activism, and I'll be glad if Instagram activism can help with something. Yesterday, a friend who has followed me for almost a year asked if I'm one of those Iranians in diaspora who hide their nationality. Her justification was "you don't post anything about Iran," and I was flabbergasted by how short people's attention span has become to care about what type of content they consume. Since last summer, I have posted frequently about life in Iran and how both the US and the regime are ruining people's lives there. It's not my fault that most users don't stay on a story for more than 2 seconds to read or check the link I shared. Even if they don't, it's still fine. I'm not a huge fan of the over-politicalization of social media either, and I treat my Instagram as that shared digital gallery. Let alone the fact that many of these hypothetically "political vloggers" are just sharing common sense or total propaganda on a regular basis. I can't forget the amount of pro-regime propaganda from the "leftists," and pro-Trump bs from the "rightists" during both wars that happened in Iran recently, and I don't really consider Instagram to be the best option for political discourse.
Regardless, I don't think I'll fully delete my account. While I cut down my "sharing habits," and mostly upload monthly spam posts lately, I deleted the app from my phone and check it way less, which caused some drama as one of my friends thought I've been ghosting her since I haven't replied to her reels in two weeks. Let's hope my touching grass plans will go well, even though the weather is unfortunately becoming increasingly humid, and my desire to actually touch grass will decrease as a result.