Journal: leaving Instagram
Since 1 January I’ve been posting faithfully on my Malefic Manach Instagram account just to see what happens. Around Lúnasa I started making videos with voice overs and the account finally started getting attention – and immediately I hated it.
The more people followed me, the lower the ratio of people I actually wanted to share space with got. Most of my followers were not engaging with the content I consider to actually have any value. They were only there to be spoon fed easy-to-digest videos, and most of them were misunderstanding most of what I said. That much was obvious from casually glancing over the accounts that chose to follow me.
People were not receiving my core message of self-effort. Even the few who would faithfully like my high-value text posts were not making the effort to read the captions – in DMs they revealed that they were consistently missing half of what I had said. Those who consistently showed up to watch my stories were not engaging with my posts; they only seemed to be there to gawk at my mental illness.
The core problem became obvious the longer I kept this up. Instagram users can’t be bothered to invest effort in reading. Those who do read the slides of a post can’t be bothered to read the caption. And even when they do, they mostly don’t digest what they’ve read. They just keep on scrolling.
Obviously this app is not where I’m going to find my target audience. When I talked with my friend who does all my design work, they asked how I would judge whether my website was successful. My answer had nothing to do with the number of views it got, or whether people were signing up for my email newsletter. I said I will know I’ve been successful when I see one person going through my entire post archive, reading article after article like a very hungry caterpillar.
If I ever want to reach the readers of my dreams, I need to divest from Instagram and commit full force to showing up here instead. Instagram is not going to lead people to my website, because the people I want to reach are not spending their time mindlessly scrolling through brain rot.
The social environment on Instagram also leaves a lot to be desired. It doesn’t feel good to engage with an app whose feed consistently leaves me feeling triggered and traumatized.
Because of Meta’s listening policies, my phone tracks my location even when I turn on Airplane Mode. Since February I’ve been receiving weekly massage in a group building that also houses a birth center. So all year I have been blasted with a torrent of ads that think I’m a pregnant woman. This is not great for me as a transmasculine person who has gone through two unwanted pregnancies. The hormonal experience of pregnancy gave me severe body horror, even for the brief six weeks I had to endure before abortion, and I don’t want to be forced to think about it every time I show up for work.
Even when the ads about pregnant women are light, the sheer volume of advertising on Instagram is out of control. One of my spiritual practices is media fasting, specifically abstinence from marketing. All year I’ve been blocking unwanted advertisers, to the point that I now have over 17,000 accounts blocked. But blocking ad accounts doesn’t make a difference to the number of ads I am served. I’m not sure why I’ve kept subjecting myself to this; I’m neglecting my contract obligations and it feels awful.
Ads aside, the user-generated content on Instagram has devolved into utter garbage. Most of what I see there is pure brain rot. Clicking through to the comments of the few high-effort posts I see always leaves me feeling disgusted. The user base is hostile, and the amount of stupidity and narrow-mindedness that abounds is sickening.
It’s funny; from collating all these feelings here I can see that I feel strongly about wanting to exit from Instagram and there’s really no other solution. But it took me until writing up the truncated Instagram version of my Mars square Venus Rx post to understand that it’s finally time to take action.
While I was writing about the intransigence of the fixed square, and how it comes through as a desire to stay with dysregulated behaviors instead of changing the lifestyle to feel better, it became clear that I was only continuing to post on Instagram because it was habitual.
On the Contemplations page I prompted my readers to ask themselves what problems they were simply hoping would go away magically, and what wounds they were trying to adapt to instead of healing. I realized that no amount of adaptation would make Instagram feel welcoming to me.
So by now the answer is clear as day. Ten months and ten days into my Instagram posting experiment, I can safely conclude that it’s not working. I can give myself permission to stop trying to force it.
As good as it feels to set the burden down, I feel some discomfort around leaving altogether. Instagram is how I keep in touch with my few remaining friends, and divesting whole ass may disconnect me from them. Perhaps with time I will become confident enough to ask my friends for their phone numbers, but that transition can happen slowly, across the rest of the Venus retrograde and post-Rx shadow.
For now I’ve removed the app from my home screen so that it will take me extra steps to reach it. I’ve decided I’m never again going to make an easy-to-digest voice over to lift the burden of thinking away from my audience. I’ve removed every follower who has never engaged with a single post or story, and this makes me feel less like a zoo animal. My world is small again, as I like it.
There won’t be another transit to write up until Thursday next week when Pluto stations direct, so I have a few days to decide whether I’ll check back in to make truncated text posts for the few people who faithfully read them. I’m not holding myself to any obligations either way. I’ll decide based on how I feel, knowing that with a defined Solar Plexus there is no truth in the now and I always make my best decisions by letting them play out slowly.
