instagram made me feel like a bad mom
well, it made me feel bad about everything
Something I’m probably most proud of accomplishing in 2024, and admittedly it’s a little sad, is that I was completely off of Instagram for half of the year. I deactivated my account in the spring and reactivated it in October only to message some of my husband’s friends for a birthday surprise I was planning.
As a kid who moved countries or states every three years, I developed an intentional nature for keeping in touch with friends. In my early years, that looked like sending letters on Little Mermaid stationery sealed with an abundance of stickers. Later, it was late-night AIM conversations, Gchat messaging during class or work, and group email chains with some of my closest friends. After college in the mid-aughts, a few girlfriends and I created a group blog (which is shockingly still live???) to stay connected, racking up almost 300 posts in a few years. These early online experiences were defined by authentic, low-pressure connections with people I cared about. When Instagram came along, it felt like a natural extension of that—a way to stay connected to important people and share what mattered to me. But over time, Instagram, and how we as a society engaged with the Internet, became something different.
I’ve always been enamoured with the possibility of connection facilitated via the Internet. It’s delivered me everything from IRL best friends (thank you Twitter) to a husband (thank you Tinder). And I’ve stayed on Instagram for almost 14 years to keep in touch with both close and fond loose connections. A few years ago I would probably consider Instagram a semi-vital aspect of my life. I used to work in Marketing, making it an essential platform to understand the ins and outs of. And when I was single, there was an element of interestingness that felt annoyingly important to project, even subtly, so that when someone asked, “What’s your IG?” I had something to show for myself.
But now I’m married, I have a baby, and Instagram makes me feel like a loser and a bad mom. A few weeks before Zora was born, I deactivated my Instagram account. I was getting inundated with typical mommy influencer content and it only added to the impending unknown of having a newborn for the first time. When I finally brought her home, I was surprised at how instinctual being a mother felt. While exhausting and intense, I rarely experienced doubt in my ability to know how to care for her - I felt really tuned-in with what she needed. If I was on Instagram in those early days, I’m curious how much of that intuition I would still feel with the deluge of parenting content being blasted my way.
Eventually, I reactivated instagram and never felt good after being on the app for more than a few minutes. My heart would race and I would feel an overwhelming sense of unease that manifested in a way that made my face feel numb. There was nothing interesting about seeing people living their seeming extra fun lives while I was (and still am) caught up in the chaotic swirl of adjusting to life with a baby, working full time, trying to keep some semblance of order in the house, and attempting to carve out a morsel of time for myself.
Then there was the algorithmic targeting. Content about having a second kid (Um, already??), contentious and contradicting POVs on sleep training (Was I or wasn’t I destroying my attachment with my child??), Tradwives who made motherhood look beautifully effortless (How do you always look so put together??), and Reels about how to get my pre-baby body back (RUDE!) were jarring. Instagram knew my life-stage anxieties and was coming straight for them.
I’m not sure what the actual catalyst was, but after a family vacation out to LA about 9 months postpartum, I deactivated my account. I missed casually knowing what my friends were up to and getting glimpses of their day to day life, but didn’t miss the firehose of random content that invaded my (limited) brainspace and robbed me of my time.
Of course, I found other ways to get caught up in my phone (aka the Internet), mostly via my social Slack group and my neighborhood WhatsApp chat, two environments that were more personally relevant to my day-to-day life. And the biggest difference was that they both had natural end points. Neither have an infinite scroll, ads, or suggested content to lose an hour of my life to.
When I returned to Instagram in late October to message my husband’s friends about his Birthday, it was like showing up to a party where everyone was a few drinks in and I was stone cold sober. I immediately muted suggested posts, I didn’t send a lot of Story replies so I wouldn’t get caught up in conversations that required me to keep coming back into the app, and maybe most importantly, I culled my following list from 900-something to just under 300. Brands out of my price-range, trendy restaurants, cute hotels upstate that I’ll never visit, ex-flings, old coworkers, acquaintances from college, and celebrities who don’t care about me, all got the boot.
Despite curating my following list to people that I want to remain connected to, I’ve found myself with a very anti-climatic Instagram account. I can spend 10 minutes in the app and see every story posted from everyone I follow, and I regularly run out of content to see.
Even with these changes, it still doesn’t feel good being on Instagram.
It’s…fine.
Boring, if anything.
I’ve reduced a lot of the dopamine inducing aspects of the app, which is probably why I find myself feeling mostly detached from the space. And it’s actually motivated me to more regularly text or call people who I was using Instagram to keep tabs on.
The early aughts Internet that I fell in love with was a bit more ambivalent - we weren’t virtually keeping up with the Jones so to speak. You could have a Livejournal, a Xanga, or even a tumblr and it didn’t matter how many people read it for you to keep sharing whatever you wanted. It was a space for you to express yourself, find other people who liked what you liked (or a place to figure out what you liked), and there weren’t reactions, likes, shares, or views to optimize for. And maybe most importantly, there wasn’t an algorithm to hack.
Today this space feels like a performance in the name of hitting the virality jackpot. Doing so garners more reach, more perceived relevance, and probably most importantly - monetization. Which I guess is unsurprising because more than 50% of Gen Z aspire to become a professional influencer. And outside of the rise of wanna-be influencers, Meta is looking to add thousands of AI generated users in the name of “entertainment” and to keep us human users more engaged in the app, which they need us to do so they can sell more ads.
Because of these shifts, these platforms have become a noisy place to exist if you’re just there to peer into the day-to-day lives of your friends. Yes, I don’t have to be a Content Creator or act like an Influencer, but the space keeps trying to push users in that direction, like Instagram trying to make you turn anything into a Reel. And I’m certainly not on Instagram to interact with creepy robot AI accounts.
I think this is why I was able to stay off of Instagram for such a long - relative to me - stretch of time this past year: What I want from the platform and what it wants from me are in opposition and neither of us are changing our minds.
My time away wasn’t actually about rejecting the platform, but rather about reclaiming my time, having control over the type of information I let have my attention, and recentering what staying connected to people that I value looks like.
Will I be on Instagram in 2025? Sure, here and there, when I have something to share. But now it’s just a tool — not a destination or a place to give my time — and that feels pretty freeing in a digital landscape that feels less and less about authentic connection.
Happy New Year, loves. <3 Hit play on this week’s playlist here.
Meghan
👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼