I found a leaked Facebook document. An hour later I deleted Instagram.
Why I haven't used Instagram in 5 years
- I'm 23, scrolling Instagram on a Sunday evening. Someone's on a yacht. Someone just closed a round. Someone with perfect abs in Bali. I close the app and feel worse than I did 5 minutes ago. My body's wrong. My career's behind. At 23 someone already had an exit, and I'm in a rented apartment wondering what I'm doing with my life.
I thought something was wrong with me. Normal people look at pretty pictures and feel happy. I didn't.
Then in grad school I stumbled on an MIT Sloan study. Researchers took 430,000 student mental health surveys and mapped them against Facebook's campus-by-campus rollout (it originally launched only at specific universities like Harvard and Stanford). Access to Facebook correlated with a 7% increase in severe depression and a 20% increase in anxiety disorders, comparable to 20% of the effect of losing your job. And the longer the exposure, the worse the outcomes: seniors suffered more than freshmen.
I thought: okay, but that's Facebook. Politics, news, comment wars. Instagram is just nice photos.
Wrong.
In 2021, former Facebook data scientist Frances Haugen leaked internal research to the Wall Street Journal. A verbatim line from their 2019 presentation:
"We make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls."
Their own research. 32% of teenage girls who already felt bad about their bodies said Instagram made it worse. 13.5% of teens said it amplified suicidal thoughts. 40% of those who felt "unattractive," that feeling started on Instagram.
But the quote that hit hardest:
"Teens have an addict's narrative about their use. They wish they could spend less time caring about it but they can't help themselves."
I recognized myself immediately. I was 23, not 15, but the pattern was identical. Open, scroll, feel worse, close. An hour later, open again. Hoping this time it'll be different.
Facebook knew. Their researchers wrote it plainly: "Social comparison is worse on Instagram." More toxic than other platforms, because Instagram isn't text or opinions. It's bodies and lifestyles. A curated highlight reel filtered through professional editing. You're comparing your actual life to someone else's best-of compilation. You lose every time, because you're competing with something that doesn't exist.
And then it clicked.
I wasn't a loser. I was using a product working exactly as designed. Its goal isn't your wellbeing — it's your engagement. The worse you feel, the more you scroll looking for something to fix it. The more you scroll, the more ads you see. Your discomfort is their revenue model.
I deleted the app. The urge to know what friends were up to stayed for a while, I moved my close circle to BeReal, then that faded too. Turns out if you want to know how someone's doing, you can just call them.
5 years without Instagram. Same body. Still no exit. But I don't feel worse every Sunday anymore.
P.S. Not telling you to delete it. Just saying it's worth understanding how the product you use actually works, especially if you consistently feel worse after than before.
Stay tuned
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