The Internet tells me that 2026 is the year of analogue culture. Staying offline more. Touching grass, as they famously say. Writing in notebooks. Reading a physical book. And most importantly, posting less of your real life on the internet. And knowingly or unknowingly, this is the bandwagon I have jumped on as well and a trend that I would like to follow for the rest of my life, but what I specifically want to talk about is the Instagrammification of communication and all social media platforms, and I don’t really know how to make this as coherent as possible. But just bear with me.
Unlearning The Digital Dependence
As someone who has been an active (or must I say addictive) Instagram user for the longest time and found all the joys in the world by scrolling through memes and memorising brain-rot content, I was surprised when, suddenly, one fine day, I woke up and deactivated my Instagram account.
It’s been two months since then. I’d started feeling quite overstimulated and overwhelmed, seeing an influx of content all the time and updates from 607 followers, out of which there were probably 16 to 17 people I actually cared about.
But this feeling of what even is the point of all this is not an experience unique to me, I am sure, and I don’t want to be garnering all the attention by pretending to be holier-than-thou by quitting Instagram. I did it because I could feel how deeply the excessive screen time was affecting me. It was a spiral of constant scrolling on the app and feeling guilty about not using that time to rest or write more.
I have always enjoyed writing, and I had no facetime with this infamous thing called writer’s block since the time I actively started writing. But in the past few months, I had almost given up on writing. I stopped writing on LinkedIn, Substack and literally everywhere.
Even the thought of applying to a literary magazine scared me because I was almost sure that I had nothing to say anymore or nothing to write about. Every time I thought I would try and write something, I ended up on Instagram for “ideas”, but what ended up happening was just me scrolling on the app.
What I initially thought was just probably a temporary writer’s block was turning into a more permanent situation of me not being able to write. And for those who don’t know what it meant for me as a writer to not be able to write, imagine your world without the thing you love the most, imagine the thing which you fought for the most being taken away from you. A part of me felt so demotivated and clueless- it was almost as if I had lost my identity, and I didn’t know how else to define myself without the tag of a “writer.”
But something changed on that cold December morning. I was still in bed, sleepy and trying to switch off the alarm. I reached out for my phone, and right after switching off the alarm, I started scrolling without any second thoughts. It was almost as if that was my muscle memory. I don’t know what snapped inside me that day, but within 10 minutes, I just deactivated my Instagram account, and just like that, almost 7 to 8 years of active Instagram usage came down to 0.
There has been no sudden urge to go back on the app, wanting to know what’s happening on the app or what people are up to, because I no longer have to wait for my friends to post stories to know about their lives. I text them, call them and talk to them more frequently than I did earlier, when in the name of communication, all we did was send reels and memes to each other. And no, your friends won’t forget you if you are not on Instagram or don’t send them reels regularly- well, at least your real friends won’t forget.
I got back to reading more frequently, writing more on Substack and LinkedIn, and I am also now in the process of planning how to write more meaningfully without losing this sudden burst of energy that I have gotten after reducing my time on the internet.
This is not a manual for you on how to resolve your writer’s block or a self-help essay on how to use your time more productively. This is just another reflection of what really helped me to navigate this uncertainty of not being able to write enough or write well because of how stuck I felt. There is no right or wrong way to channelise your energy or time. I am no one to instruct you or tell you when to use Instagram or when not to, and neither am I going to judge you for being on the app or for being on your phone in general.
All that I am saying is that every time the internet overwhelms you or every time you feel that you are unable to give time to your creative pursuits, maybe it’s important to pause and think whether it is only the workload that’s stopping you or is there something deeper and more inherent to how you use your time.
Ishita Bagchi is a published author who navigates the realms of Gender, Economics, and Public Policy through her newsletter and blog, “The Wannabe Economist.” She channels her passion for writing through her poetry, and abstract essays in her Substack newsletter, “The Whimsical Poetess,” and her Spotify podcast, “Abstract Thoughts, Poetry & Coffee.”
This article is a part of our ongoing series, Your Monthly Dissent Dispatch, in collaboration with Usawa Literary Review. | Views expressed by the author are their own.
