40 days without Insta (not sure I'm going back)

Giving up social media for St. Michael's Lent was, at first, a decision that sounded somehow silly. But forty days without Instagram, and honestly? It wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be! Not only that, but the benefits were also more than I expected.

During the first week, I would try reaching for my phone in the middle of the day, only to have to redirect my thoughts and remind myself that I have no need to be online. I did that more frequently than I thought I would, but after this, it was absolutely fine. Easy. With my current work and moving house again, there was no time to be too tempted anyway. I don't think I noticed before how much mental noise and anxiety this app can actually cause.

The Archangel Michael Defeating Satan - Lucas Kilian 1588

During this time, we discovered a vinyl player in the new house, something I had been curious to try for a long time (I was born in the CD era, so…). The whole ritual of choosing a record, reading the sleeve, placing the needle, letting music happen for real... No more of that constant flood of music scraps from endless reels: seconds of someone’s art cut from the whole body of work, cheap feelings that come and go. How many times have I cried over a short video only to laugh at the next one? That is actually a bit sick, when you think about it.

So I cancelled my subscriptions. I went through a season of trying to find better streaming platforms before, but now I just find myself not wanting to have anything to do with them at all. Having all the options in the world available is not that nice. I’m content with a couple of options, and then, boredom. It’s less of a burden. It also makes me stop to listen, and listen properly, and enjoy music like I haven’t done in a while. (now playing: Doves)

To complete this shift, my husband came home with a film camera from an old man’s garage sale. I had never had one like that, a proper professional film camera, with all those mysterious buttons. We did some research together and stretched our walks a little further to take a few pictures. I mean, they were really a few, because we got the wrong film, so we cherished every shot. Will they come out as I intended? Did I get the settings right? The next step is another good practice for the soul, very unpopular in these times: waiting. Waiting to use all the rolls, then sending them to the lab, then waiting a little more for them to come back. And if we weren’t successful, we learned something. So it’s all good. Slow things help the mind, and the heart, to go slow as well. I am convinced we need this more than we think.

And then, when I opened Instagram again, I had never noticed so clearly how loud and empty that thing can be. Sure, there are bits of really good stuff here and there, and oh, the animal videos, but generally it was just noise, information I don’t really need, and the feeling of being emptied and too full at the same time.

It is also abstract. Too far away from reality. Hours of work, even years, become a few seconds on a short video, which we easily forget after another scroll. And I realised that, as much as I already struggle to leave my mind and be more present in my body, nothing compares to the curse of this age, where everything is... in the cloud.

St. John Paul II said it with precision: “the body, and it alone, is capable of making visible what is invisible: spiritual and divine reality.” In Theology of the Body, he recovers a truth that industrial modernity, and now digital modernity, tried to destroy. The body is not a prison of the spirit, but rather represents the “high valuation of the material.” The Incarnation makes this even more radical. In Christ, the human body becomes the body of the God-man. God did not despise matter; he assumed it completely. He could have come down from heaven as a... spectre. But no, he got into a womb. The Blessed Virgin’s body gave Him the cells, and the Creator infused Himself into His creation. This means that materiality itself—wood, paint, light, sound, touch, scent—is capable of containing real, even divine, meaning.

When we pray with a rosary in our hands, it is not superstition. The physical object mediates our relationship with the divine. The material symbols represent a spiritual reality. When we participate in the Eucharist, it is not a metaphor: the bread becomes His body. The real presence matters, and matter matters because God entered into it. He gave us senses and a 3d world for a reason, and beauty, and the capacity to experience all that. Protesting this is not n;w, it's basically gnosticism, which is one of the old enemies of the gospel—anyways, that is a subject for another time, perhaps.

Back to the problem: with industrialisation, something started to happen between matter and meaning. Things became more and more about usefulness and profit. Workers became part of a machine, and communities were changed to fit the needs of that machine. Objects stopped being things that could carry meaning and became things to buy or consume, and then the greedy stomach wants more. Material things were slowly stripped of their soul, and now it feels like we have built a whole world that is slowly stripping ours as well. Anyone having a quick look around can tell how much we crave beauty nowadays. That is secretly a craving for virtue, as well, or at least this is what I think St. Ignatius of Loyola would say.

And we are going even further away from matter: now, everything becomes data. We talk through screens, we rent things instead of owning them, we subscribe instead of buying, and even our money is... a bunch of codes on a screen. The soul finds a void that no amount of notifications can fill.

I am convinced that most people are so tired of all this. Just... very tired and bored of social media. And tired of AI. Tired of information. Tired of people trying to convince you that you need to buy their course. It no longer works. And I also think the world is healing! Maybe there is balance, so I don’t know if I want to disappear completely. I’m still an artist, I’m still curious, and there are still things online that I genuinely enjoy. I see people who seem to have found a much better way of dealing with all of this, and maybe I just haven’t found mine yet. But I do know that I have never been more creative, or more at peace, than when I am offline.

And that makes me wonder if I actually want to keep feeding this machine… I don’t want to “hook” you. What the does that even mean? I don’t want to make something just because it will make you stop scrolling. I don’t want to rage bait people into commenting because that gives me more views. I don’t want to turn something I actually care about into a little trick to keep someone on an app for another thirty seconds.

And maybe this is where I am at the moment. I still believe there are very good creatives online, people making beautiful things and trying to find their way through all of this. I have met wonderful people here. I have sold copies of my poetry book to people I never imagined would find it, and some of the most meaningful support came from my real-life, physical community too. For those of you who found me online and followed my work anyway, I really cannot tell you how much I appreciate it.

I’m just thinking that I want to live my life a little differently from now on. So I won’t necessarily vanish, but I definitely won’t be going back. Most updates will probably come through the newsletter, where I can actually write properly without thinking about whether something is “engaging” enough. And that is what I enjoy most anyway. Writing. Making things. Taking pictures. Reading. Looking at things for a long time. Being bored. Going outside. Talking to people in real life. Doing things that don’t need to become “content”.

I think comparison is a trap, especially here. There are people who are genuinely brilliant at this world of visual communication, and some people may have found a way to use social media without letting it use them (I hope). If so, that is a real skill. But please remember that you are looking at a stage. People know how to show you what works; they know how to make things appear beautiful. They know how to make you want to keep watching. You are not seeing the whole person, or the whole life, or all the things that went wrong before that beautiful little post appeared on your screen. Don't feel bad if your reality doesn't look like that because it is, at the end of the day, a little piece of a much more complex world.

Maybe that is what I am trying to remember too. That is okay, or even better (how absurd it is to even say this), to live without an audience, without the commitment to make myself a consumable product. To make things that don’t need to be posted. To have thoughts that don’t need to become content. To do things that nobody else will ever see! To not need validation, because we say we don't need it, but we search for it. We are afraid of being misunderstood and judged, but oh, my goodness, we will be misunderstood and judged most of the time regardless of our efforts. There is always a filter, either online or offline. It doesn't really matter.

The goal is to be free, to be brave enough to be honest and authentic, whether or not this fits into what looks like a successful life or not. And as humans, we do want to be seen and to connect, but we also need to be invisible at times. Most of all, we need to be real, so I’m not here giving advice; I just know that I want more of my life to happen away from the screen, in reality.

Less really is more, when you think about it.