Dear Diary, I took Instagram off my phone...

And also TikTok, Threads, and X...

I’m pleased to report that it’s been a quiet week in the village for once.

No one tried to shame anyone over chalk. No one tried to sabotage anyone else’s book release. There was that one incident when a tractor tried to drive over the pavement to avoid roadworks, and now there’s some vague talk of the residents perhaps barricading the road through the village to stop people speeding through it¹, but other than that, I have very little to report.

My book was released, and I started planning the next one. Max went to the zoo with his class. My uncle arrived from Canada for a visit. I bought a pair of those horrible Yeezy knockoffs from Amazon, and got really quite stressed over the logistics of getting to the Taylor Swift concert and back next week. I ranted a lot about the Tory’s plan to make teenagers work for free. I thought about moving to Canada. I felt almost crippled by sadness at the horrors of the world. I started having near-constant intrusive thoughts about some of the things I’ve seen on social media this week. I wondered what I could possibly write about here when no one’s annoyed me on the internet² and the world’s a dumpster fire that I can’t seem to switch off from. I bought a pair of sequined leggings on Vinted, just in case it’s cold on the day of the Taylor concert, and I can’t wear the outfit I’ve planned. I regretted this instantly. I worried a lot about money. I snuck into my child’s room every night to make sure he was safe, and I thought about how many parents in the world right now can’t do that.

I know, the whole ‘chalk’ thing was a lot more entertaining, really, wasn’t it? I really miss last week, when killjoy neighbours and vengeful book reviewers were top of my list of things to feel bad about.

Anyway, the upshot of all of this is that I’ve taken most³ of my social media apps off my phone: not as part of some grand statement against social media, or even just to protest the fact that Instagram only shows two of my followers my posts these days (Hi, Mum and Dad!), but purely because I genuinely can’t open Instagram in particular right now without ending up in tears over some horrific image or piece of information that’s been shared. Most of the images are mental in my case; I’ve so far managed to avoid seeing the very worst of the actual images I know are being circulated online, but I can’t trust it to stay that way forever, and when the images in my own head are stopping me sleeping at night, I know that seeing them for real would make it hard for me to function at all. So, for now, this seems like the only way to preserve my own sanity, and although I’m very aware of what a privilege it is for me to be able to take steps to do that when so many people can’t, it’s something I really need to do.

I’m not quitting social media. I mean, I’d quite like to at times, but right now social media is still a fairly important part of my business (both in the sense that I occasionally get paid to post things there, and in the sense that I use it to promote my books…), so I couldn’t just quit it completely, even if I wanted to. And the fact is, I don’t think I do really want to. Not all the time, anyway. As much as I hate social media for everything I’ve said above, and a whole lot more besides, I have to admit, I still enjoy looking at the pretty pictures, and getting little glimpses into other people’s lives, even when I know it’s probably ‘fake’ — or at least not the full picture. (I especially enjoy all those Reels where there’s some implausibly attractive 20 year old getting up at 5am to show us her three-hour morning routine, including roughly £5,000 worth of products. Would miss those if I quit completely…)

But, with that said, it has started to take over my life a bit. I’ve never really been the type to bang on about how social media is the devil’s work, and people spend too much time on their phones; until recently, I’d have said it’s brought more positives than it has negatives to my life, but lately it’s been pretty much all negative, all the time. And that’s why it has to go.

So the apps have been deleted, as of halfway through yesterday. I’ll probably re-download some of them occasionally, when I have something I particularly want to share (like the aforementioned Taylor Swift concert, for instance), and can’t be bothered doing it on desktop, but, for now, they’re gone. My husband thinks I’ll struggle without them, but that’s only because he doesn’t know about my Vinted addiction yet, and how much more expensive that’s going to be than Instagram ever was.

So, next week’s plan is to delete Vinted. For now, though, I’ve been busy dusting off the ol’ blog (the photo in this post is an old one, from one of the posts I’ve been editing this week), and being very glad I decided to start this newsletter last year, because otherwise I’d have absolutely no one to show this photo I took on my walk this morning, which totally doesn’t do any justice at all to how pretty it was in real life:

Until next week,

1. I’m very much in favor of this, btw.

2. Unless you count Rishi Sunak, obviously

3. I kept Facebook, purely because I need to keep abreast of goings-on in the village. Very few people I know in ‘real life’ ever post on Facebook now, though, so I mostly just use it to keep up with the various author groups I’m in, which are relatively unproblematic compared to the rest of the internet.