My early side effects of deleting Instagram

I’m newly 29, living in London, working in marketing, where my job is to understand the dynamics of paid media. So yes, I am, as you’d expect, a loyal and long-time social media user. In fact, I remember signing up for Snapchat so early that I still own ‘andywatson’ as my username. Ironically, it’s actually the platform I use the least, so sadly adding me won’t be very useful.

Instagram has always been my bible for keeping up with the world - sport, friends, colleagues, headlines, and those random people you’re not really friends with but follow anyway for some unexplainable reason. But about a week ago, after diving too deep into too many rabbit holes (especially with everything going viral), I decided to take a leap of faith. Today marks seven days since I deleted the app from my phone.

Filling in the gaps

“The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.” - Samuel Johnson (18th century).

The first day of hopping “off-grid” (just to make it sound more adventurous), you notice something strange. In those interim moments - between emails, walking between rooms, or even worse, mid-conversation your hand drifts to your phone almost on autopilot. Not to call, not to text, but to check the feed. What’s happening on Instagram? Who’s posted? What’s gone viral?

At first, it feels more interesting than concerning. But then you start to count how many times a day your brain looks for that little dopamine hit: like after like, share after share. It’s the moment you feel just how strong a bad habit really is, how deeply human nature takes over.

A couple of days pass, and the fog lifts. You realise how much time you truly spent on Instagram, how much useless real estate it occupied in your brain, and how many hours of “gap filling” it consumed in your day. So I tried replacing it. In the interim, I turned to the Financial Times. Out of all the Times, Tribunes, and Journals out there, the FT has been my most reliable companion. Its writers from across industries and countries give me something far more substantial to chew on than a carousel of holiday photos.

Now, instead of doom-scrolling for a couple hours a day, I read five or six articles. Is it the perfect trade-off? Maybe not. But it feels like a step in the right direction.

And it raises the real question: do I actually need to be on social media to do my job? As it turns out, no. Do I need to know what someone I haven’t spoken to in years is doing on their holiday this week? Definitely not.

Pay to play, or pay to NOT play?

While I could bore my wonderful readers with some long-winded philosophical awakening on why social media is bad, let’s be honest, everyone already knows this. None of it is new: the algorithms are designed to trigger engagement, most content isn’t trustworthy, and haters behind keyboards always find peace in destruction.

As they say, timing is everything. Just a few days later, I was introduced to a brand called Noble Mobile, run by the same brilliant team who helped lead Dean Phillips’ Presidential campaign, and who worked alongside Alex and I at Igloo. Now to put it simply, what Noble does, is incentivizes users NOT to use their phone, by giving them the option of essentially selling excess data back to the provider, in exchange for a refund. So while the monthly subscription is $50, you could be paying a whole let less by not using your data nearly as much as your allowance.

This sparked a wider thought: what if we slowly built an entire industry built around incentivising consumers to engage less in certain ‘bad’ habits, or in what you might call “necessary luxuries”? Your phone or social media being a prime example. Energy is another. In fact, renewable energy companies already do this by letting homeowners sell power back to the grid in exchange for credit. UK businesses tried similar approaches with the Cycle to Work and electric car schemes by incentivising tax breaks for businesses.

But what if someone paid you for every mile you walked each day? Or for the amount of water you drank? Or to consume less alcohol, or maybe smoke less? As you can probably gauge, I’m at the very early stages of this ideation. But after 15 years of being active on social media, a stereotypical millennial ‘addict,’ could I be the only one jumping ship and thinking less may mean more? And could there be a way to monetize this thesis? Check back in with me in 6 months, when I’ve been rejected by 50 hungry VCs!