I don't care what you did last night

Leaving instagram was never about detox.

ITA | ENG

Since November (2025) I disabled my Instagram account. Among the things I sometimes hear is "oh, the social media detox". Or: "you too, a victim of infinite scrolling, I should cut back too, you know". I tend not to argue about it, I nod and agree with whoever I'm talking to. But that's not the core of my choice.

We live in a period that is becoming almost obsessed with the idea of "detoxing" from technology. Dopamine, compulsive scrolling, like addiction, etc. Legitimate topics, sure, on which books are written and careers are built as gurus of digital wellbeing. But reducing everything to this seems to me a convenient way of avoiding the "real" short circuit I think I've identified.

The phrase that kept coming back to my mind is simple: I have the right not to know what you did last night. It's not a hostile statement, it's not indifference. It's the claim to a mental space that social media, in their ordinary functioning, have made almost impossible. Instagram doesn't ask your permission to show you other people's lives. It delivers them to you automatically, in random order, at any hour, whether you like it or not.

The paradox is that you don't even need to be curious. You end up knowing where someone you've met twice had dinner, what an old classmate thinks about a news story, the holidays of someone you shared three years of university with and then never heard from again. Information no one asked you to receive, and that you have (almost) never chosen to seek out. And yet there it is, part of your daily mental landscape.

There is a legal concept called the right to be forgotten: the right of a person not to be perpetually defined by information from their past. But I believe its mirror image also exists, namely the right of the observer to be able to forget, not to be constantly updated, to maintain a relationship with others filtered by the natural distance of time and space. Social media have abolished that distance.

It's worth making a distinction that seems technical but isn't. Uninstalling the app is a consumer gesture: you stop looking, but you continue to exist on the platform. Your profile is still there, searchable, part of the digital archive of anyone who wants to find you. Disabling or deleting the account is something different, it's an almost ontological gesture. You're not just stopping watching: you're choosing not to be seen, not to occupy that space. It's the difference between closing your eyes and leaving the room.

In the debate around digital health, FOMO, Fear Of Missing Out, is often cited as the main driver of our compulsive relationship with social media. And in part it is. The response that has gained ground in recent years is JOMO, Joy Of Missing Out, the conscious pleasure of not being there. But even this seems to me still trapped in the same logic: it presupposes that not being there is a renunciation, almost a luxury to reclaim. What I experienced is more ordinary and more radical at the same time: I simply didn't miss anything. Which suggests that much of what we feared losing didn't really exist outside the platform itself.

There was then another thing, smaller but perhaps even more revealing. I had started to notice that every time I heard a new person mentioned, in a conversation, at university or by chance, my first instinct was to open Instagram and look them up. Before even meeting them. Before exchanging a single word. I already wanted to know what they were like, what they posted, what life they led in the only version of themselves they had chosen to make public.

That gesture seemed to me, thinking about it, a social shortcut. I was skipping the process of getting to know someone, that slow, unpredictable thing by which a person reveals themselves to you over time. I was short-circuiting it with a profile, with a grid of curated images. And I was doing it without even realising it, like a conditioned reflex. The Self-Determination Theory identifies autonomy as one of the fundamental needs of human beings: the feeling of acting according to one's own will, of choosing what and how to get to know. Instagram erodes this autonomy. It doesn't take it away by force, but bypasses it, delivering information you didn't seek and relationships you didn't choose to deepen in that way.

I'm not saying Instagram is evil, nor that those who use it are doing something wrong. I'm just saying that, for me, the choice to leave had nothing to do with mental health in the way it's usually discussed, concentration, sleep, performance anxiety. It had to do with something closer to interior privacy. With wanting to go back to not knowing.

Since I did it, life hasn't changed much. No FOMO. The people who matter I still hear from. The news still reaches me. I haven't missed anything important, I'm not out of the loop. My life simply goes on, and perhaps that's precisely the point. The idea that without an active profile one exists less, that one risks disappearing, was already a trap. One I hadn't realised I had accepted.