Get off your phone.

Experience real life.

I deleted the Instagram app off my phone.

Again.

Every time I install it with the best of intentions, to use with purpose and discipline, I quickly find myself dragged back into the endless scroll. It’s not my fault.

I could blame Aza Raskin, the inventor of the infinite scroll who is now seemingly deeply regretful of his creation.

I could blame Meta, who spends every waking hour trying to keep me on its platforms for as long as possible.

But whoever’s fault it is that my eyes are almost permanently glued to a screen in one way or another, the only remedy is for me to delete every potential distraction from my phone and make it as difficult as possible to access it.

The world’s best psychology-driven designers are making fortunes in Silicon Valley from the attention economy, selling the hours you spend squinting into blue light to advertisers for buckets of cash. The only way I can stand a chance of beating them is by putting as much friction between me and them as possible: hiding apps from my home screen, making the colours an uninviting monochrome, or smashing my phone to pieces with a baseball bat.

Duck photography is a preferred alternative to scrolling. Image: Thomas Winward

The kicker is that none of this stuff is even any good. Writer Cory Doctorow explains the degradation of quality in digital services today far better than I could, describing it brilliantly as ‘enshittification’. The word was given the accolade of American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year 2023, suggesting how much a painting of social media as an intrusive, addictive, negative and ultimately valueless service resonates with people.

I gain nothing from Instagram. I occasionally post links to my writing in the vain hope I might pull in some new readers, but as Tom Cox observed, Instagram today is “more dominantly a way for writers to reach people with attention spans like grated parmesan who are too psychically oppressed by social media to read books any more.”

I deleted my Twitter account a long time ago, and can’t begin to explain how much better I felt in a very short time. My periods without Instagram are bliss. Without Instagram I can comfortably leave the house for an afternoon walk while my phone stays inside on my desk. When I do have Instagram installed there’s always something gnawing in my brain, a nasal, anxious voice encouraging me to take my phone with me in case there’s a cool thing I can film or photograph and share for a swift, sweet hit of dopamine.

My time spent outside without my phone is a vastly more pleasant experience. My senses breathe as one. The birdsong is clearer, the flowers sweeter, the raindrops cooler.

A world without social media is real. A world with social media is increasingly putting into question the very notion of reality itself. When your perception of the world around you is shaped by algorithms giving you fictional stories from fictional news sites, deepfake videos of AI-generated politicians saying things they never said, and photo-realistic videos of people and places that were completely invented by a text prompt on a computer, it’s no wonder that populist politicians maintain enormous voter bases and people think the world is flat.

Take the below video, for example.

It has all been generated as part of OpenAI’s demonstration of their new text-to-video tool. Absolutely nothing in it is real.

In a year of vital elections around the world that will determine the health of our climate and natural environment for generations to come, the need for truth has never been more important.

And it’s not something you’ll find on your phone any more.