The one change that worked: I deleted Instagram – and embraced the joys of a truly private life

I'd become obsessed with appealing to my invisible audience. But since I ditched the app a year ago, my quieter moments have taken on brilliant new meaning

I first downloaded Instagram when I was 17 and became hooked on it the way most people fall in love: slowly, and then all at once. For a long time, I never considered myself a social media addict. I self-righteously refused to download TikTok, declared Snapchat to be for children", and posted less regularly on Instagram than half of the people I followed.

As I went through my university years, however, certain changes crept up on me. I began to swap reading - or essay-writing - for hours spent curating new posts. On my way home from lectures (or later, from my work as a journalist), I would spend ages trying to take the artsiest, most perfect picture of that evening's sunset for my story - as if the people who followed me were eagerly awaiting yet another photo of one of the Earth's rotations. What usually followed was a night of reloading my feed to see how many people had reacted to my post - or worse, hadn't reacted at all.