It's Time to Quit Zynstagram

Maybe, hopefully, the end is near

Each week, a menu of sorts, around a revolving theme. This week: the death rattle of social media.

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Course 1

A Word of Gratitude: Arizona Ice Tea

As you’ll read below, I’m glad to have been born and before social media, and that I was able to develop the structure of myself and my personality before things became too… whatever this is now.

Just this morning I was thinking of this VHS tape that still exists, when me and a couple of my best friends lugged around a camcorder for an entire night of hijinks in a small town with absolutely nothing to do. It was mostly mundane stuff like wearing a World War II gas mask into a 7-Eleven just to see what the attendant’s reaction would be (very nonchalant), throwing knives at old couch cushions, drinking Arizona Ice Tea in a VFW parking lot and staying up til dawn during a time when people were losing their minds about the Hale-Bopp comet.

It was all dumb and pointless, but we were obsessed with this documentation of our lives. We thought it was hilarious. We made something, and we watched it again and again as if it were a work of art. We never thought anyone else would ever see it, and no one ever did except a few friends. It didn’t need to live forever on social media, we weren’t trying to impress anyone. But that VHS meant so much to us.

I still don’t know why, but it’s such a vivid memory in my mind. It hasn’t been lost in the mess of everything else that’s happened since then (though it is buried somewhere in a closet). But at least I know it’s there, and that it happened.

And for that, I am grateful.

Course 2

The Main: Red Zynfandel

There was a time, not too long ago, when a major vibe shift happened in the United States. It wasn’t around an election, it wasn’t the result of a historic tragedy or success, and there wasn’t a tacit agreement among any group of people that this is how we would act.

But at some point, we just decided that smoking cigarettes was… gross. That clouds of tar and nicotine floating around us during all hours of work and play didn’t have to be the norm, that clean air didn’t have to be a mandate just for factories and car exhausts and downtown smog. We all deserved a smoke-free world.

As with the internet and cell phones, I’m old enough to remember the analog times of smoking– before the oral USB sticks of vaping, before ZYN was tucked away inside lower lips, a little dopamine boost to get you through the next corporate Zoom call. I remember airing clothes out on my mom’s clothesline at three a.m. after a hazy night at Chick’s Tavern, relying on the night air to pull the smoke away from my only pair of jeans for the next day. I recall playing poker with friends and accidentally drinking a Snapple bottle filled with tobacco spit, something that happened on more than one occasion. Sigh, just look what they’ve taken from us.

The first time I really remember the vibe shift away from smoking was when my brother moved to Baltimore to live with my wife and I while he was trying to stay clean and sober (side note: I do not recommend coming to Baltimore to stay clean and sober). He was 20 years old and working at a restaurant in Fells Point at the time and invited me to come hang out with a group of his friends at their house in our neighborhood (side note: I do not recommend working in a restaurant in Baltimore to remain clean and sober). It was a warm summer night and a crew of restaurant staff were drinking on a back patio; music was playing, the usual rehashing of industry life was going on. Everyone was in their twenties. At some point, I went to light a cigarette and it felt… weird. Out of place, even. Nobody else was smoking or had been smoking at any point in the evening.

If you’ve worked even a day of your life in the restaurant industry during anytime in history since the dawn of man until 2010, you would know that this, of course, is absolutely insane. Restaurant workers are single handedly responsible for half of all tobacco profits (not true, but probably not not true). Any lull in service, any pause in the evening madness, is a chance for a smoke break. Scream inside a walk-in cooler or sit on a milk crate next to a dumpster and smoke a cigarette– those are your two outlets for relief.

At that party, I not only felt out of place, but I felt old, even though I had just turned 30. These were kids. Partying. We should all be smoking, we should be bumming smokes when our packs run out, guys should be lighting girls’ cigarettes and we should all smell like the bottom of an ashtray by the end of the night. This is what kids do!

Well, used to do, anyway.

Prior to that evening, over the past few years, things had been changing. Restaurants and indoor places had begun to phase out smoking altogether. Places where I waited tables as a teenager with two separate sections– one for normal people and one for people who couldn’t sit for 45 minutes without lighting up– were now smoke-free. As someone in a band who smoked as a way of life, this seemed un-American, a potential violation of the constitution and surely a burden on the unalienable right to life and liberty. I remember being flabbergasted that a bar– a place with drinking!– made you separate the two habits, like an unethical slicing away of conjoined twins. Surely this procedure will not be successful, surely everyone will agree that smoking in a bar is the intelligent design of God’s natural order, I thought.

I thought wrong, of course. Slowly then suddenly, doing it in public felt wrong. Even outside at a sidewalk table after dinner– something that’s a sacramental rite in any European country– was now off-putting to everyone around. The smell of it, the sight of it, all of it. To the back doorways and gazebos and alleys ye go, said the public.

And then we all just replaced it with marijuana. (That defeats the purpose of the point I’m trying to make, so we’ll skip that part.)

All that to say, if sitting is the new smoking, then social media is the new sitting, and I predict that very soon, it will all be over.

Now, I know I’m not the first to predict its demise. Substackers like Ted Gioia have been sounding the alarm for some time (his most recent post “Are Social Media Platforms the Next Dying Malls?” is pretty much spot-on). The departures from social media and their airport-style announcements seem to be a trending topic on this platform especially.

I’ve touched on the topic at times throughout the past year, mostly to note my own addiction to Instagram or doom-scrolling X or collecting as many advertisements as possible on whatever Facebook is supposed to be at this point. But this is the first time that I’m writing about it in full, because I actually feel it within myself.

The end is near and I welcome the sweet relief of death.

I’ve been a Facebook user since the early days, was a champion of Myspace during its short-lived peak, and I had an active Twitter account before disabling it 7 years ago. I posted my first Instagram post 13 years ago to the week I’m writing this, a photo of Fells Point from the top floor of that same restaurant my brother worked at, where I had also worked previously. It currently has four likes.

In the beginning, there was value. Hope, even. Everyone had a sense that there was some creativity and worth in what we shared, even if the photos were filtered into oblivion. It was a way to say “hey look, I find this interesting, you may too.” Sharing your own life, learning about interesting things, seeing places around the world from different perspectives. You had a friend network and followed people who you were genuinely interested in, not what Instagram told you to be interested in. It seemed like it accentuated life instead of taking away from it.

Further along, I made an Instagram for my running (as beginner runners do), which now has almost 10,000 followers with very infrequent posting, mostly in part to my public profile at Believe in the Run. When I joined the team at Believe in the Run, it had less followers on Instagram than I do now; currently, we have over 150,000. I’ve amassed over 3,000 followers on Strava, another social media platform of which I rarely look at. I managed social media for the Baltimore Running Festival for years. I did the same for Speedland, a shoe brand whose voice and social media presence I helped developed for the first year of its existence. I’ve made multiple reels that have gone viral with millions and millions of plays. All that to say, I’ve been deep into social media for some time. I know how it works.

And I hate it.

I hate how the companies took something with a grain of good and turned it into a drug. A seed of promise for artists and creators and sharers, relentlessly pivoted and regurgitated into a cascading slop of senseless garbage, layered into a landfill lasagna of advertising. No skills learned, no inspirations gained. Just forgettable nonsense.

I hate how the algorithm knows me so well, that it can prick the parts of my brain and light it up like Rudolph’s nose when I see a skateboard trick, a largemouth bass, or someone unclogging a drain on my phone screen. I hate it for the slot machine that it is, that I physically can not stop myself from scrolling and losing 15 minutes to two hours of time whenever I open the app.

I hate the hours its taken from me. The first thing when I wake up, the last thing before I go to bed. Hours that I used to use for reading, or working on a project at home, or even watching a movie from beginning to end. I hate it for pulling my eyes away from my kids when they’re telling me a story about their day or asking me a question about anything at all, no matter how stupid or inconsequential it may seem. I hate it for running like a background server in my brain, all those bits of information and opinions and ice-cold hot takes distracting me from pinning down a real original thought. These moths and mosquitoes flying around and taking up whatever little space I have left to think about things.

I know I’m not the only one. We all know we hate it. Nobody thinks: “Man, I wish I had an extra hour in my day to do what I love: watch more Instagram reels or TikToks.” We hate influencers shooting content on the street, we hate people walking into us on the sidewalk because they’re not looking where they’re going, we hate drivers swerving into our lane as they’re trying to find the right emoji while driving 80 miles per hour down the interstate.

All of these are things that used to be annoying, but now they’re just exhausting. The good news is that the zombification is almost complete and the axes are on the way to deliver the death blow. I feel a shift coming, a turning against the tyranny that promised us full bellies and rich lives, but delivered a weak broth of skin and bones without the marrow. You can only live on that so long before the hunger forces a rebellion.

The sleight of hand doesn’t work anymore. Every new platform is an imitation of another platform, a copy of a copy, the pixels becoming more diluted with every passing version. We know it sucks, and whenever we jump to a new platform or algorithm, that realization comes even faster because we see the flaws immediately. The drug has been cut too many times and we’re never getting back to that original high.

A decade later, we’re starting to finally realize the widespread damage of the social media cartel’s influence on our lives. Our kids are anxious, hopeless, and depressed. I can’t focus on anything because I’m always thinking about everything. We’re numbed out and existing in a holding pattern, using screens the same way we used cigarettes at work– an escape from the monotony and boredom of our own lives. As with any addiction, the despair feeds the hopelessness and it keeps spiraling downward until we’re on our death beds thinking of all that time flicking through screens, all those literal years gone… for what? Nothing that lasts.

Everything has become pass-through, ephemeral bullshit. A viral reel doesn’t even get people followers anymore. It’s all momentary, a whisper in the loudest wind. To be successful on any of these platforms requires a bending of the knee, either to the corporations that host you or to an advertiser that pays the bills. Sacrifices are made at the altar of capitalism and we’re all the golden calves, our ribs sticking through our emaciated bodies, milk run dry, and yet we climb up again and again. Hoping for something to lift us out of wherever we are in life right now.

Personally, I can’t do it anymore. I suspect the tide is shifting and others are feeling the same. I see it in online discourse, I hear it in conversations with friends. I even see it in youth, who are the great hope of the rebellion, the ideal vessels to rage against the machine. I suspect the social media companies know this too and see the writing on the wall. It’s apparent in the ways that the companies are constantly shifting their strategies and algorithms, trying to hook us in some new way they haven’t thought of yet. I mean, who can blame them? It’s worked until now.

But I’ve been missing stuff in life. Maybe I’m just getting old, maybe I’m just getting tired. I think it’s more than that.

Over the past year, I almost get physically ill when I look around a dinner table on a work trip and I can’t find a person to have a real conversation with because it’s all just influencers posting to social media and commenting on what other social media influencers are posting about. What kind of life is this? I have no idea who you are– you are a fake version of a real thing sitting in front of me and you mean nothing to me.

Over the past few months, when I’m in a room with someone and hear reels going off, one after another, bits of noise and information that make no sense outside of the person viewing them, I just want to leave.

Over the past couple weeks, when I’m trying to engage with someone or sit in a room and hope they’ll start talking to me, but instead they just pull out their phone to scroll, I just get depressed.

Like Tim Robinson in a dying mall:

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe this is my last gasp before going under, before giving in and putting Instagram back in a coveted thumb position on my home screen. Maybe in a year I’m still wasting hours of my evenings flicking through Instagram reels, waking up in the morning and spiking my cortisol in the melee of a comments section. Maybe I’m still taking shits while watching daredevils jump off bridges and cliffs. Or maybe Substack becomes my new addiction. It is, after all, a social media platform in disguise.

Hopefully, though, I quit smoking again.

There was a time, nearly a decade ago, that I quit all social media for a month. A dry January. At times during that month, I had such clarity of emotion, such a deep reaction to things that it seemed beyond the bounds of anything I had felt in recent years. It was like a layer had been scraped off my senses, the detritus and topsoil removed to reveal the rich earth below.

I’ve never gotten back to that and it still haunts me.

I’m hoping to get that back, just a little bit of it, whatever that was. To live life on my own terms, to feel what I’m supposed to feel, not what the algorithm tells me to feel. To think through my anxiety and stress and to-do list, not slink off to the 7-Eleven and buy a pack of Zynstagram in a moment of weakness. To sit with those around me at dinner or in a foreign country and take in everything they’re saying and appreciate where we are and that we’re alive.

I hope I can do that, because I think I should. I want to feel the most alive.

Maybe I’ll even buy a real camera and take a real photo, not for Instagram, not for Apple, not for Facebook, not for Strava, not for Threads or X or Bluesky. Not even for Substack.

A real, tangible photo, just for me. It’ll last longer.

Course 4

Dessert: A Repast of the Past Week

This week was a wild one, for sure. I had the pleasure of going out to our car on Tuesday morning and finding out that somebody tried to steal it. It was unlocked and we keep nothing in it, but apparently there wasn’t a Hyundai or Kia on our block, so somebody cracked the steering column case and then did something to the ignition. It started, but the automatic locks wouldn’t work, which resulted in a trip to the dealer.

The good news? The mechanic at the dealer had an old ignition from another car (as well as two keys), and replaced it at no cost to me. So while, yes, I had to cough up $450 for a diagnosis, at least I got an extra key out of the whole deal since I had lost our spare while trail running a couple years ago. Could’ve been worse.

Had a few good runs this week, but otherwise I kind of feel like I’m just coasting out the final weeks of 2024. That said, I have been going to the gym in my new weightlifting journey and that has actually been a lot of fun. It’s something I’m excited to get into, especially since I may or may not have lost an arm-wrestling match to my wife at some point this week (definitely a fever dream).

I also contribute to The Drop, a weekly email from Believe in the Run, where I round up running news and stories in a generally sarcastic (and sometimes heartfelt) manner. You can subscribe here.

I’m also the co-host of The Drop running podcast, one of the top running podcasts in the country, where we mostly talk about things other than running that thousands of people seem to find entertaining. You can listen to this past week’s episode here.

Ingredient List

Usually this is where I put my inspirational reading or listening choices for the week, or things that just struck me as cool or interesting.

Okay, honestly, I have some stuff to throw on here, but I’m going to put it in next week’s email because I’m trying to get this out in time for Sunday suppertime. Thanks for the patience.

END OF MENU

Thank you for dining with me this evening, I hope the service was acceptable. Tips (whether monetary or recommendations to others) are appreciated, but not expected.

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