¬ just serendipity 🍀 (not just serendipity)

Following the footsteps of enacting 2025 as a year of Tech Independence, I got rid of all my Instagram posts¹.

There were some 250+ posts spawning 10+ years.

Why? #

In no particular order:

• new acquaintances don’t need to know about my whole timeline / history / past, whether it’s employment, locations I lived in, locations I travelled to, activities, hobbies, etc

• reduce dependence on Big Tech™ (even further)

• effectively eliminate my attachment to the platform. No data, no regrets

• Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier. I read this book 5 years ago (2020) and it always stayed in my head. I wrote the following review on Goodreads at the time:

  Decent read for this century overall, but the book is quite repetitive. The author repeats the BUMMER acronym a lot, it’s quite annoying. But his arguments are relevant and decent to some extent. One thing that misses the point is that the author treats social media as a blackbox, you’re either in or out. There’s no middle ground. There are some gray zone use cases that are useful and aren’t necessarily manipulative. Marketplace and community-based Discussion Groups are two of them. Still, if you consume personalized newsfeeds or stories on a daily basis then you should definitely read it.

I don’t believe you need to be that much radical or strict to the point of completely getting rid of them, nonetheless it’s not particularly difficult to achieve a healthy balance either. Personally, I deactivate my account for weeks or months at a time ephemerally, and this tends to work well for me.

• focus more on the present. I don’t need to keep looking back at my social media posts if there are no posts to look back to in the first place. This fosters a healthy feedback loop wherein incentives to live in the present are continuously rewarded

• privacy!

• more incentive to direct resources towards platforms I care more about (e.g. this blog!) – opportunity cost

• intentionally eliminate most of the friction I had to share my private account with new acquaintances

As a side effect, I added a link to my profile at the footer of this site.