I have a pretty utilitarian relationship with social media.

I have a LinkedIn account, so my potential clients get the impression that I’m a reliable person, and I have a Twitter account because it connects me with a lot of smart people that I wouldn’t have the opportunity to interact with otherwise. That’s all. Together, these hardly cost me twenty, maybe thirty minutes a day.

But Instagram and I have been through too many up-and-downs. On the one hand, using Facebook products causes me severe cognitive dissonance for reasons I have no time to explain. On top of that, mindless scrolling had been eating up too much of my time lately. So I finally decided to uninstall the app. It’s not the first time and probably won’t be the last.

I was talking about this to two friends yesterday. They helped me realize that I am on IG only to follow a handful of people I love, but what got me into zombie-scroll mode were random memes, nudes, cooking, and design inspiration accounts that I mindlessly hit “follow” on. But I didn’t want to miss out on friends updates, so I re-installed IG and Mariekondoed my following down to a select few. I find it hard to believe that’ll be enough to tame the attention-hungry beast. At least I can keep an eye on my friend Dmitrii who’s snowboarding today but has no previous experience and may very well end up breaking his neck.