What’s Quietly Making Your Life Worse and Your Thinking Less Original
A few months ago, I deleted my Instagram account.
The decision was an easy one and followed a similar pattern to when I stopped drinking alcohol three years ago.
I barely drank for years before deciding to stop, and every time I did, I felt the heavy impact on my well-being.
The same happened with social media. Over the last year, I used Instagram less and less. I never had TikTok, and Facebook is a relic of the past.
Yet the negative effect on my well-being became more obvious the less I used it.
I realised Instagram, or any social media, doesn’t really fulfil any healthy purpose.
You just have it, kinda mindlessly. Your attention and behaviour serve as fuel for a machine that has become exceptionally good at exploiting our psychology and brain chemistry.
Now, when I unlock my phone, there’s one screen. You can’t swipe.
It’s messages, maps, notes, calendar, Spotify, a meditation time app, banking, IMDb, ChatGPT. That’s it.
Still, for weeks, I kept having this weird phantom urge, more often than I’d like to admit.
Standing in line? Reach for my phone.
Sitting in the tram? Reach for my phone.
Waiting for the kettle to boil? Reach for my phone.
Except there was nothing to open anymore.
No stories. No infinite scroll. Just… myself.
And that’s when I started to really see how deep this stuff goes.
The lies we tell ourselves about “staying connected”
There are two big stories we like to tell about social media:
“I use it to stay in touch with people.”
“I get so much educational content there.”
Both of them sound reasonable. Both of them are (at least partially) lies, I believe.
1. “I use it to stay in touch.”
Let’s be honest: watching someone’s story is not “staying in touch”.
You see their beach, their brunch, their kid, their new flat. Maybe you tap a heart or send a fire emoji.
You feel like you’re up to date with their life.
But when was the last time you actually heard their voice?
When was the last time you called them and said:
“Hey, how are you really?”
Since I quit Instagram, my relationships haven’t disappeared.
If anything, they became more intentional.
I send more voice notes.
I call people just to check in.
I write actual messages instead of reacting to stories.
I meet people to hang out.
It’s not as “efficient”. It doesn’t scale.
And that’s exactly the point.
Social media gives you a cheap illusion of connection: you see many people, but you meet almost no one.
You outsource friendship to an app and then wonder why you feel lonely.
2. “I learn so much from my feed.”
This one is trickier, because it can feel true.
You follow coaches, therapists, productivity accounts, founders, philosophers, nutritionists, and artists.
You get carousels about trauma, ADHD, sales funnels, AI, attachment styles, nervous system regulation, startup strategy, relationship advice, whatever.
The algorithm is creepily good at serving you exactly what you’re already obsessed with.
So yes, some of it is “educational”.
But here’s the problem: it’s pre-chewed thinking.
You don’t have to struggle with ideas.
You don’t have to sit with confusion.
You don’t have to read 300 pages to arrive at one sentence that hits you in the gut.
Someone else already did the hard work.
You just scroll, nod, save it, maybe repost, and feel like you’ve done your intellectual workout for the day.
You haven’t.
It’s junk food for your thoughts.
Not only that, they even chew it for you, and all you have to do is swallow.
Over time, this has a cost: your thinking muscles atrophy.
You become less generative and more reactive.
Your “opinions” are mostly rearranged versions of things you saw on a reel.
That’s the real price: not the hours lost,
but the originality quietly leaking out of your life.
You lose one of the most important skills you can have: to think deeply and uninterrupted for a prolonged period of time.
What happens to your brain when you stop feeding it the feed
When I deleted Instagram and Reddit, nothing magical happened in the first week.
I was just… itchy.
There were these micro-moments that used to be filled with scrolling:
waiting for a friend, sitting on the toilet, lying in bed, brushing my teeth.
All those little pockets of time where I used to reach for a dopamine hit.
Suddenly, they were empty.
I could feel my brain negotiating with me:
“Just install it again, we’ll use it mindfully this time, promise.”
“You’re a grown adult, you can handle an app.”
“Also, you’ll miss important stuff.”
But after a few weeks, something shifted.
Because I couldn’t plug every little gap with a feed, I had to fill it with something else:
I pick up the harmonica for five minutes and just blow random notes.
I sketch logo ideas on paper like a kid rediscovering pens.
I stare out the window.
I think.
I stare at the ceiling.
Not all of this is glamorous. A lot of it is boring.
But inside that boredom, something interesting reappeared: inner life.
Original thoughts don’t come when you’re constantly consuming.
They come when you’ve been alone with your brain long enough for it to get weird again.
And I realised:
This is what the feed slowly steals from you. Not just time,
but the texture of your own thinking.
The fabric of your ideas, untethered.
Original. Raw. You.
The stuff that only comes out after you’ve been thinking deeply and uninterrupted about something for a prolonged period of time.
The quiet death of reading
There’s another side effect nobody warns you about:
Social media quietly makes books unbearable.
Not because you suddenly hate reading, but because your nervous system gets used to high-speed, high-density, low-friction input.
A book feels slow. It doesn’t flash, ding, or autoplay.
Sometimes nothing “happens” for pages.
If all you care about is “key insights”, of course, it feels inefficient.
Why bother reading 300 pages when you can get a 5-bullet “summary” on an app or with ChatGPT?
But the point of reading is not the summary.
The point is the strange, meandering, non-linear path your mind takes while you’re reading:
That one sentence that sticks for days, and you don’t even know why.
The random reference to another author, which sends you to another book.
That image that nudges a childhood memory to the surface.
The slow build-up of context that changes how you see a problem.
Books were the original hyperlinked world. Footnotes and references were the first “links.”
Books are an intimate art form.
Some would even say an intimate and dangerous art form.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, speaking about book bans, put it like this:
“The people who are in favor of book bans understand the power of books much better than those who oppose them. Books are intimate. They’re a one-on-one connection…
A kid takes a book into their bedroom and has a connection no one else can perceive.
Even if you read the same book, you wouldn’t have the same interaction, because books are a union between the imagination of the reader and the words on the page. Everyone’s experience with a book is different.”
You followed those links manually.
You wandered, and in that wandering, you became someone.
That high you feel when a sentence fires through your heart, mind, and body — that’s the moment you enter an intimate relationship between your imagination and the words on the page.
That feeling of being connected to something beyond you, perhaps to the collective wisdom of humanity, perhaps to whatever intelligence is guiding this universe.
When you replace deep reading with swipable “knowledge,” you’re not just changing inputs. You’re changing the kind of human you’re becoming:
Less patient.
Less subtle.
Less able to sit with a question without immediately reaching for an answer.
That’s what I mean when I say this stuff makes you unoriginal. It robs you of the long, slow, slightly uncomfortable processes that creativity actually needs.
It steals you from the necessary struggle of creation.
Because the struggle is where the magic actually happens, not the polished moment at the end, but the awkward, messy middle where nothing fits, nothing flows, and you have to sit with the discomfort long enough for something real to form.
That slow tension, the sentence that refuses to land, the idea that won’t reveal its shape, the feeling that asks you to meet it halfway, that’s the birthplace of originality.
When everything is “easy,” nothing truly new emerges.
Social media removes the friction, but friction is the thing that sharpens you.
It’s the resistance that builds the muscle.
It’s the silence that forces the thought to appear.
Without that struggle, you’re not creating, you’re consuming your own potential.
The science: what happens when almost 35,000 people log off
All of this could just be my subjective rant, but we now have some pretty solid data that points in the same direction.
A huge working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research looked at what happens when people actually deactivate Facebook or Instagram for six weeks before the 2020 US election.
The study happened during the six weeks leading up to the 2020 election, an unusually stressful, emotionally loaded period. Which makes the findings even more striking: even in a moment when people were shifting to other apps, stepping away from Facebook or Instagram still improved their emotional state.
Rough shape of the experiment (simplified):
~19,800 Facebook users and ~15,500 Instagram users.
All of them used the platforms for at least 15 minutes a day.
Some were paid to deactivate the platform for six weeks.
Others deactivated just for one week (the control group).
Researchers measured how often people felt happy, depressed, or anxious.
What they found (again, simplified):
People who deactivated Facebook for the full six weeks reported a noticeable improvement in their emotional state compared to the control group.
People who deactivated Instagram also improved, a bit less strongly, but still meaningfully.
The biggest emotional benefit from Instagram deactivation showed up in women aged 18–24.
When people left Facebook or Instagram, they didn’t suddenly start hiking or meditating more. They mostly just shifted that time to other apps, which means that the emotional benefit came from stepping away from those specific platforms, not from some dramatic lifestyle overhaul.
The effects are not “my life changed 180 degrees overnight”.
They’re more subtle. Think of nudging the average person a few percent towards “I feel happy often” instead of “sometimes”.
But for a single change, turning off one or two apps, that’s… a lot.
And it matches what I felt:
Deleting Instagram didn’t suddenly make my life perfect.
It just made room.
Enough room for other things to grow in.
Like this podcast.
Like writing.
Like actually enjoying being bored enough to pick up a harmonica at age 35.
We are not brands (and that’s the good news)
There’s a quote I heard on a podcast that has been hunting me for months.
It was from a French author whose name I still haven’t been able to track down, which drives me absolutely insane because I want to credit him properly.
I wrote the quote into my Traveler’s Company journal, into the section where I collect sentences that feel like they rearrange my insides a bit.
It goes roughly like this:
“Popular expression becomes the most valuable expression.
Social media is an aggressive expansion of capitalism into our personal relationships.
We are asked to perform for our friends, to create things they like, to work on a personal brand.
Brands teach us that authenticity means consistency, you must always be the same self to everyone, or risk being discredited.
But humanity cannot be true or false. We are full of contradictions, and we change. That is the joy of human life.
We are not brands. It is simply not in our nature.”
I love this quote.
Because that’s exactly what social media quietly trains us out of:
our right to be contradictory.
Online, you’re implicitly punished for being messy, evolving, confusing, complex:
If you change your mind, you’re a hypocrite.
If you show too many sides, you’re “off brand”.
If you’re too quiet, you’re irrelevant.
If you’re too intense, you’re “cringe”.
So you flatten yourself into a version that “works”: the version that gets likes, saves, DMs, applause.
And bit by bit, you lose the freedom to be the full, weird, shifting human you actually are.
That’s the deepest reason I’m out.
Not because social media is evil or because nobody should ever use it for anything.
Some people genuinely depend on it for their work. I get that.
I’m out because I don’t want my personality optimised for engagement.
I don’t want to become a brand that happens to live in a human body.
I want to stay a human who sometimes contradicts himself, sometimes disappears, sometimes gets obsessed with dark chocolate rankings and harmonica scales instead of “content”.
And for me, that required a fairly simple, very unsexy move:
Delete the apps.
Let my brain freak out for a few weeks.
Wait until the quiet becomes interesting.
An invitation, not a crusade
I’m not here to convince you that you must quit social media.
You are an adult. You know your context.
And I’m definitely not pure, I still use Substack, I still exist on the internet, I’m literally talking to you through a digital platform.
But if something in this hits a nerve, here’s a tiny experiment you could try:
Step 1: Delete just one app from your phone for seven days. No dramatic farewell. Just gone.
Step 2: Notice what happens in the gaps. What do you reach for? What feelings show up?
Step 3: If it feels tolerable, extend it to a month. That’s where the more interesting changes begin.
Step 4: In those reclaimed minutes, do one small, slightly “pointless” thing:
doodle, write a paragraph, read two pages of a book, play three bad chords on a guitar.
Not to be productive.
Not to build a brand.
Just to see what your mind does when it’s not being constantly fed.
The real question behind all of this is simple:
Who were you before the feed started telling you who to be?
I don’t think you need another app to answer that.
You probably just need a bit more boredom, a bit more silence, and the courage to let your own thoughts slowly become interesting again.
Thanks for reading!
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AI has been used to refine structure, grammar, and flow, but every idea, sentence, and story originates from human experience and intuition.
Great read. A week digital detox was one of the healthiest things I've done! Well done for giving up social media!