Why I'm Leaving Instagram in 2025

How We've Sacrificed Personal Holiness at the Altar of Evangelization

I have vivid memories from my sophomore year of high school of sitting at the dining room table in my parents’ house, “doing” homework … but not really doing homework so much as scrolling on Facebook. My parents would walk by in a direction that allowed their oversight of my laptop and scolded me every time. I’m sure my mom told me she was at her “wits’ end” on more than one occasion.

I created a Facebook account when I was in 8^th grade (one year prior to the age minimum at the time). My only Facebook friends back then were girls on my club volleyball team (they were high school girls), so my engagement was severely limited. But the intrigue was certainly there, and I waited with bated breath for those first days of my freshman year, when the slew of new classmates that I’d not yet had the capacity to meet in real life began to grace my Facebook friends list.

I know I’m not the only one who cringes now when I see the “On This Day XX Years Ago” Facebook notifications that serve only to remind me of just how obsessed I was with social media (and quoting out-of-context Relient K lyrics) back in those days. On the one hand, I shake my head at myself. What was I thinking?

But on the other – I know exactly what I was thinking. I was a 10^th grade socialite – constantly in trouble with my teachers for talking with those seated near me – and Facebook was socializing on steroids. I was obsessed.

No, really – I think I was addicted.

When I opened The Anxious Generation for the first time a few weeks back (a gift from my husband – we won’t wonder aloud whether this gift came with any underlying intentions), I fully expected to be reading almost exclusively about Gen Z. I thought for sure that this book was about the influence that early-age Tik Tok and Instagram exposure had on an entire generation of unsuspecting American pre-teens and teenagers.

What I did not expect was to see myself in the data.

Millennials, it turns out, sit right at the front end of data when looking at the generational impact of social media usage – more generally, internet usage – over the past 3 decades.

And as I read page after page of data detailing the negative impact that social media usage – not even heavy usage… just usage – has on unsuspecting minds, so many of my experiences with Facebook (and later, Instagram) came into focus.

This wasn’t necessarily the primary driving force behind my recent decision to leave Instagram, but it was certainly a major contributing factor. Negative experiences I’ve had but have struggled to put to words over the years have long left me questioning whether having a following on social media is truly worth its weight. In 2018, I gave up social media for Advent and I was stunned at how it changed my life. I suddenly gained hours back in my days and my prayer life improved instantaneously. I had more peace, slept better, read more, and an overall higher quality of life, without question.

At the time, my following was still relatively small. As it has grown over the years, I’ve continued this tradition with myself of abstaining from social media during both Advent and Lent and the results are positive every time. In fact, the larger my audience gets – the more relieved I feel to delete the app from my phone and forget about it for a few weeks.

So, what’s this about? Why is it that something which should, in theory, be relatively harmless (it’s all virtual, after all) causes me so much distraction, distress, and anxiety?

And what drove me to the point of deciding to eliminate it entirely?

1. Social media causes me to obsess over what others’ are thinking about me.

In The Anxious Generation, author Jonathan Haidt repeats a timeless piece of wisdom, first stated by Epictetus:

“If your body was turned over to just anyone, you would doubtless take exception. Why aren’t you ashamed that you have made your mind vulnerable to anyone who happens to criticize you, so that it automatically becomes confused and upset?”

He goes on…

“Don’t waste the rest of your time here worrying about other people – unless it affects the common good. It will keep you from doing anything useful. You’ll be too preoccupied with what so-and-so is doing, and why, and what they’re saying, and what they’re thinking, and what they’re up to, and all the other things that throw you off and keep you from focusing on your own mind.”

It's actually incredible that he wrote this in the second century, because it couldn’t sum up the experience of social media more appropriately than it does.

It calls to mind a million examples for me, but one in particular really stands out. Almost five years ago, a friend at work told me that his wife had “stopped paying attention to me” on social media because she didn’t like my tone. When I tell you that I have lost sleep over this singular, passing, totally unsolicited and unprompted comment… I mean, first of all, it’s not constructive. It’s nonspecific – he provided no examples and did not elaborate whatsoever. Not to mention the fact that his wife and I had interacted in person maybe twice – so it also felt impersonal and, I’ll be honest, a bit judgmental. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it stung. Like, really stung.

It's been five years and I can still take myself back to that exact conversation – I could tell you exactly where I was standing and what I was doing. I thought about it for weeks afterward (and still think about it on occasion now). Frankly, it poked a hole in the trust that he and I had established inside of our working relationship.

Why did such a thoughtless, passing comment have such a profound impact? It’s hard to say. Perhaps it’s because many of us make ourselves vulnerable on social media. And when that vulnerability is violated in some capacity – whether through criticism or judgement or rejection – and by a person who has not reciprocated with that same level of vulnerability, nonetheless – we feel wounded.

We are wounded.

In this capacity, social media represents a flawed dynamic because, for many of us, it cannot be truly reciprocal. It’s one-sided.

But I digress from my initial point, which is that Epictetus’s comments couldn’t be any more relevant than if he’d traveled to the present and said it today.

What a giant waste of time and energy.

Regardless of the reasons, it is entirely true that I have spent way too much time deeply preoccupied by this one person’s thoughts about me. I’ve found myself wondering whether she thinks I’m too aggressive, too political, too… honest?

And I’ve coached myself heavily on this, reminding myself that you are not for everyone. Not everyone has to approve of you. What’s more, this person doesn’t actually know you.

But, unfortunately, none of this dulls the sting. And as a result, I’ve wasted so much time being confused and upset. And for what? Really, for nothing.

2. Social media causes me to compare myself to others – including my close friends.

Haidt notes in his book that Facebook commissioned a study years ago on how Instagram was impacting teenagers – specifically, teenage girls. The results were never shared by the company publicly (go figure), but we know what the study found because an employee leaked the data.

The most notable point is that “teens blame Instagram for increases in the rate of anxiety and depression...” Of this revelation, researchers noted that “this reaction was unprompted and consistent across groups.”

Additionally, they noted that “social comparison” is more significant on Instagram than on any other platform. The heavy emphasis on full-body photographs (as opposed to selfies) and sharing about one’s lifestyle lay the groundwork for widespread comparison.

None of this should come as a shock to any of us. We already know that we’re comparing ourselves to other people based on what we see on social media – in fact, whether we’re willing to admit it or not, that’s why many of us are on social media in the first place… to tell a story about our lives that makes others feel inferior. It’s part of the gratification.

I don’t feel ashamed to say I’m guilty of it because we all are. We’ve all posted something on social media at some point that we knew would invoke feelings of jealousy in our followers. Or, at minimum, impress upon others the message we all want to send, which is:

“I’m winning.”

I want to emphasize here how this issue of comparison is simply not present in my real life the way that it is on social media. Perhaps posting photos of our bodies, families, homes, and vacations places those things under a microscope – but the negative feelings I have even toward my own (offline) friends when they post certain things simply do not exist when I’m hearing about their lives while we’re catching up over coffee. It’s just different.

Maybe that’s just me. Perhaps others struggle with comparison in their offline relationships more than I do – but my observation has been that any feelings of resentment or jealousy that I might be experiencing because of what I’ve seen on social media disappears when I’m not engaging on Instagram.

3. Engaging with others on Instagram deters me from engaging in real life.

This one is a bit of a new discovery for me and requires some contextual details.

When my husband and I met, I was known in our church community as being a bit of a “social butterfly.” My husband is an introvert, so my reputation deterred him from pursuing me for quite some time (his sister tried to set us up numerous years before he finally asked me out on a date).

Now that we’re married, he has marveled at how I am sometimes more introverted than he is. In fact, we have both observed that he is much more likely to have plans with friends on the calendar than I am on any given weekend. Frankly, he convenes with his buddies sometimes as often as weekly… meanwhile, I (the “social butterfly” of the two of us) will be lucky to make plans with a friend once a month.

(I should mention that my husband is only on Facebook. He’s not into social media.)

Over the years, we’ve taken to joking about this dynamic between us a lot. Recently, however, I expressed to him that I sometimes find it concerning how little interest I have in seeing my friends in person. Actually, I sometimes find myself actively avoiding it. There have been days in recent months that the thought of engaging in any kind of social activity – even with my closest friends (ie: my bridesmaids) – strikes me as being completely undesirable. I genuinely just don’t want to do it.

Last month, I read the following excerpt in The Anxious Generation and a lightbulb went off:

“If we’re dividing the hours of the day and our mindshare between more and more relationships relative to the past, we’re almost certainly investing less in each individual relationship. Digital substitutions for real-world social engagement reduce the drive to be social but don’t satisfy emotional needs… I think this created a really powerful trap: this form of interaction superficially satisfied the drive to connect with other people, but that connection was shallow, immaterial, unsatisfying. The human impulse to see other people was dulled without accessing the reinvigorating power of actual human connection.”

All of this is said within the context of emphasizing the importance of quality over quantity when talking about female friendships. And as Haidt illustrates with some *shocking* graphs, when quantity trumps quality by way of female friendships, loneliness surges.

He goes on:

“This is the great irony of social media: the more you immerse yourself in it, the more lonely and depressed you become. This is true both at the individual level and at the collective level. Their communion needs were left unsatisfied – even for those few teens who were not on social media.”

I should mention that, obviously, I am not a teenager – nor do I believe that I use social media the way a teenager does. Just the same, wouldn’t it make sense?

At present, my Instagram account (which will be permanently deleted at the end of this month) has almost 11,000 followers. Last I checked, my engagement rate sat around 7 percent. At its peak, an average of about 1500 people would view my stories on any given day. This means that when I posted a question box asking for suggestions on formula, or breastfeeding, or baby sleep, I would receive as many as 105 responses total.

Think about that for a second. That’s 105 people I am engaging with, virtually all at once. And this is all without accounting for whether or not I had an actual conversation with any of these individuals – most of whom, for the record, I did (because I felt obligated – another dynamic of having a sizable social media following that I struggle with). No person was made to engage with so many people at once.

And, for me, this reality was always apparent. My husband will attest that any day I asked for advice or insight on Instagram, I was distracted, distant, moody, and tired. On those days, all I wanted to do was watch TV and stare at my phone. Every. Single. Time.

It’s a cycle that I couldn’t seem to escape – which, unsurprisingly, is how its designed.

If you stop engaging on Instagram – stop scrolling, stop posting, stop interacting with others in private messages – your engagement rate goes down. If your engagement rate goes down, less people see your content. And if less people see your content, your account is less valuable and a significantly less powerful tool.

Meta knows this and, what’s more, they designed it this way. And for almost 7 years now (the number of years I’ve been intentionally growing my Instagram account), I have been trapped in the loop of engagement at the expense of my offline friendships.

4. Instagram distracts me from being a wife to my husband and a mother to my son.

As time has gone on, I’ve become increasingly convinced that this notion of my Instagram following existing as my “mission field” is a lie from the enemy. This is the number one argument I’ve heard from people who 1) have a large following of their own, or 2) cannot imagine having a following and deleting it outright (as I plan to). I realize that I’m using strong language here, but I intend it that way. Here is why:

My primary mission field is and always will be by family. My husband and our children are the only “mission field” that’s been divinely appointed to me, and it was appointed to me through the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony and the Great Miracles that are my son and unborn daughter’s lives.

They are my mission field. They are my Vocation.

It’s possible that the Lord has used my Instagram account as a tool to reach people who need to hear a particular message. In fact, I deeply hope that He has – because if He hasn’t, I’ve wasted an incredible amount of time and energy. Nevertheless, all of this was defensible when I was unmarried and had no children. Spending hours doing Instagram lives and answering questions about abortion and riffing about politics was all justified when, frankly, I had nothing better to be doing.

But I have more important things to do now.

Don’t hear what I’m not saying: I’m not saying the work of a married woman with children is more important than the work (in this case, the work of showing up as a socially-conservative Christian on social media) of an unmarried woman. In fact, the work is not more or less important – it’s just different. But now that I have a husband and children, I can confidently say that yes – serving them in whatever way required on any given day is absolutely more important than posting for strangers on Instagram.

Nothing will convict you of this reality as a parent than coming to the realization your toddler has been staring up at you for who knows how long, trying to meet your gaze, while you’ve been distracted by whatever’s happening on your cell phone screen. The mere fact that my 1-year-old – who’s never used an ipad or an iphone – grabs at my phone any chance he gets is an indictment of me and my attachment to this object.

Frankly, I won’t have it. I won’t be too distracted by Instagram to look back at my son when he’s looking at me. I won’t be the wife who left a sink full of dirty dishes to greet my husband when he arrives home from work because I was distracted by scrolling on Instagram and didn’t see the time. I won’t be the woman who’s a ~keyboard warrior~ for Republican politicians in defense of eliminating vaccine mandates and seed oils, but too absorbed by online arguments to get down on the floor and read a book to my babies.

I will not have it. I will be the master of my own time and attention.

And I won’t buy this lie that I’m betraying a mission field that God intends for me. Anything that stands in the way of giving my husband and children my primary attention is not what God intends for me (and is a violation of the Vocation that I discerned and desired).

5. Instagram causes me to sin.

Of all the reasons I have for leaving Instagram for good, this is the one that trumps them all. No question in my mind: Instagram causes me to sin.

I’ve already mentioned that it causes me to neglect my Vocation. When I am preoccupied with Instagram, I fail to anticipate the needs of my husband and children. This negligence of my responsibilities is, frankly, indefensible. Instagram as both a distraction and a secondary priority tempts me away from the duties of my role on a regular basis.

It also paves the way to jealousy and envy – coveting others’ belongings, dissatisfaction with what I have, and preoccupation with material possessions. And this isn’t just a result of what I see others posting about – really, it’s the result of simply being present on a platform that is 1) inundated by advertisers, and 2) has access to data that informs them of exactly what I’m interested in and tempted by.

Have you ever considered how the algorithm is a perfect tool of the enemy? It tracks your every move, takes note of what you click on, then feeds it back to you at a rate and volume which is statistically-proven to conquer your inhibitions. I know I’m not the only one who’s looked at something online – a purse or a dress or a pair of shoes – and fallen prey to a well-placed ad a few days (or hours) later. It’s diabolical.

Instagram causes me to pass judgement on others – for their opinions, their perspectives, their choices, etc. In fact, Instagram makes it so easy to judge other people that it’s not even conscious – it becomes a reflex. I see something and, immediately, I judge it – context, be damned. The algorithm has trained my brain to decide my thoughts and feelings well before I’ve gathered all of the necessary information to have well-informed thoughts and feelings. Instagram has conditioned me to make snap judgements.

And Instagram makes it impossible to turn the other cheek when I sense (through a message they’ve sent me or a comment they’ve left) that someone has judged me. This might actually be the worst outcome of all – the bitter resentments I feel toward people who judge me, misunderstand me, or criticize me.

And that’s without mentioning that all of this is happening via a screen, where it’s impossible to gauge others’ intentions through tone and facial expressions. In that regard, the message or comment doesn’t even have to be a real slight – a perceived slight is enough to illicit anger, bitterness, and resentment.

These interactions are, for me, the most pervasively toxic. And the most effective at provoking from me a reaction that, in any other context, I’d not be inclined to give. Whereas, in-person interactions exist in real time, exchanging comments and messages over Instagram never does. I can read a judgemental message and mull over a perfectly sharp-tongued response for hours – and sometimes, in particular moments of weakness, I do.

For someone like me, who is rarely unkind to a person’s face but – in my most sinful moments of weakness – relishes in a clever clapback, this setup is my kryptonite. It’s just too easy to feel better after another person has made me feel bad.

That’s dangerous for me and for my soul.

There is so much more I could say – I could go on about how Instagram causes me to spend money frivolously, tempts me to ruminate on the past, distracts me with news and politics and so many other self-gratifying preoccupations which serve only to steal my attentions away from the aspects of my life that are mine to devote myself to.

But the most convincing piece for me in all of this has been the fruit: the overwhelming, undeniable, and inherently attractive peace that has come from eliminating it completely. I’ve been mostly “off” of Instagram for the better part of a month now and never once have I thought to myself, “I wish I could peruse Instagram today.” In fact, I’ve found myself grateful on so many occasions that the pull to open my phone and scroll has drastically dissipated.

I share all of this to raise the flag in others’ hearts. What is Instagram doing – really doing for you? Is it serving you and your family? Is it providing income that, at the moment, you can’t envision eliminating? Is it giving you an outlet – a means of connection with the outside world at a pointedly isolated season of your life? All of which have the potential to be goods, and are legitimate reasons to maintain a presence on Instagram.

Or…

Is it distracting you away from what’s important in your life? Is it drawing your gaze past that of your children and down to your phone? Is it causing you to question your instincts as a wife… as a mom? Is it creating an overflow of information that leaves you stressed and anxious? Is it making you resentful, jealous… even hateful of others?

All questions worth asking in a world where we sometimes fail to consider whether we’ve lost sight of the battle for personal holiness in pursuit of evangelization.