Pooping vs Instagram
I Deleted My Instagram Then Regretted It. Here's What It's Like To Be Me.
Talking about quitting Instagram is as passé as telling someone about your LSD trip. I don’t know what to do about that. This is my venue, so I guess just deal with it.
I started this Substack because it was time to get off of Instagram, and I needed somewhere else to vent. Since deleting my Instagram a few months ago I have enjoyed more personal clarity, increased productivity, less depression, and more enjoyment in all aspects of my life.
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Lol just kidding. Life is more or less exactly the same. Better yet, yesterday while I was pooping, I made a new Instagram account— @josh.kenazi.
What got me off Instagram was really a constellation of events that all aligned suddenly. Over quarantine, I’d poured myself into Instagram, had a nice little following, and really got the dopamine and community I needed during such a weird time.
As the world started to “open” up again, I realized these people who I’d been interacting with were really separate from my daily life. That suddenly felt like a waste of time. Around the same time, my partner and I invited another couple and their infant to move in with us. We were trying out communal living. While I definitely would not call that experiment a success, I did learn a lot. Specifically, I watched two people living their day-to-day lives, and I watched their Instagram content and I was flabbergasted at the disparity. It’s no secret people curate their lives on Instagram, but to see it in both realms was really special.
I’d watch them get into what I consider earth-shattering fights with one another and then see blissed-out totally different content on their feeds. It felt like a mirror held up to my partner and I who—while we were both really raw and vulnerable on our feeds—no doubt still “played the game.” That is, we gave our followers only what we wanted them to see. The whole thing suddenly felt icky. I tried to deactivate my Instagram, but found myself re-activating when I couldn’t sleep and was up in bed at night. I felt that deleting it was really the only way to break the chain, so I wiped the slate clean.
Everything is About Relationships
I think as a society, we have really warped relationships with everything: warped relationships with family, warped with our partners, warped with our media, with our devices, with our products with our work, with our drugs, with the Earth.
And when I say warped, I mean that we don’t see them as clearly as we could, and we don’t see them in a way that feels healthy and cohesive. For instance, I’m a strong believer that marijuana (and alcohol) are far too trivialized. There is a portion of the population that can have healthy relationships with weed and alcohol and so they push the narrative that weed is great and alcohol is fun. And then of course there is that portion of the population that says weed and alcohol are, for lack of a better word, sinful. The disparity here has nothing to do with objective realities about weed or alcohol, it has to do with a warped relationship to these substances. Objectively, the only word to describe alcohol and weed is that they are powerful. Much like God and worship, it is only our relationship to the Powerful that determines whether it is detrimental or beneficial to our souls and those around us. And, in actuality, it is only our relationship to everything—even our thoughts—that determines how we navigate life. Krishnamurti said it better:
When we don’t want to face these issues, we tend to minimize them. “Weed is just a plant, Bro.” “There is no God, I’m a diehard atheist.” “So what, I’m having a few drinks after work.” Nothing is innately wrong with these statements. But to my mind, in the wrong hands, they are often justifications for not looking closely into one’s own relationship with the thing they are delegitimizing.
I believe the best relationship with something is one of calmness—not strongly in defense about the drug/religion/thought and not strongly in offense against the drug/religion/thought. True confidence is quiet because it has all it needs.
I think toward the end of my Instagram life, it was not a calm relationship. And unlike a drug, Instagram didn’t come from the Earth—per se— it is constantly engineered so that my relationship with it is bad. There are teams of humans tracking my behavior and making sure my experience of Instagram is one that keeps me coming back to it even when I don’t really want to. I started to feel that. It started to feel icky, I started to feel like there is no safe relationship with Instagram, I needed to get off.
My Relapse
In many ways, getting back on Instagram feels like a relapse. I feel like I quit a drug and now I’m consciously hooking myself back on to it. Why? Easy: Power and Community.
As for community, when I relapsed I was sitting on the toilet reading Fox News out of morbid curiosity as my son played in the bathtub. I realized how sad it was that during this time I would usually interact with tons of lovely people from around the country, and now it was just me emptying my bowels. I missed that community, and I missed that power.
Much like our relationship to anything Powerful, we enjoy Instagram because we envision it makes us Powerful. Drugs and religion bring us into the divine, but Instagram delivers true Earthly power—also known as an audience. And Instagram is popular for a reason: for audience-hungry people like me, it’s fairly easy to feel powerful. I remember I saw this rapper once who had 18 million followers and I didn’t have a single friend in common with him. That means that out of my whole following which felt super big for me—a couple of thousand people—none of them had any interest in this guy. Yet he had 18 million followers. Both him and I could feel like little kings in our little kingdoms.
The truth is, I want to be a little king, I want an audience, and I will tell you why.
You can use this exercise to get to the source of any confusion in your life. It’s called the 6 Whys and is super simple: just say the statement that concerns you and then ask yourself why 6 times.
Statement: “I want to be a little king. “
Why? Because I like power.
Why? Because I see a lot of people with power who I think are dumb or mean so I feel like I deserve it to some degree because I think I’m smart and nice.
Why? Because at my core I really love who I am, I think I have a unique way of seeing the world and navigating it, and I want to share that with people.
Why? Because I have always loved sharing knowledge. I’m still so boyish when I’m reading a good book—especially Michael Pollen or something full of random facts and inroads—and I compulsively tell everyone everything cool I’m learning and reading.
Why? Because when I learn or experience something valuable, I think everyone deserves to have some of that value as well.
Why? Because without sharing that value, I feel like a complete nothing. I don’t think I can be valuable unless I’m giving value.
Sad, right? Maybe, maybe not. It’s all about my relationship to that truth.
About a year ago I did a Kambo ceremony where some anti-vax Venice beach blonde burned frog poison into my skin using a hot stick. I wouldn’t do it again for a variety of reasons except for a remarkable experience right before the poison was administered. I was given a deck of tarot-like cards which were supposed to help me set an intention for the ceremony. The image on the card I pulled was a jungle with this huge layer of silhouetted animals. I could see birds and bears and giraffes all clumped together in this large shadowy blob. And carved out in the center was the shape of a human.
I resonated with it immediately. She asked me what it meant to me. The thought came so clearly: I am made up of everything around me. It’s not that I am a little nothing, it’s that I feel my most complete and clear when my relationship to everything around me is as tidy as possible, it’s the only way I can see my true form.
As such, it’s a reality of this incarnation for me that this is who I am. I’m defined by my audience. The first time I was on Instagram, I wanted it all: Anyone who wanted to click that follow button was really a friend to me. This time around, it feels different.
My intention is to make sure that this amorphous silhouette of beings surrounding me—my audience— is not made of devilish or sickly or angry creatures but kind and curious and excited creatures, the kind of people who I could call lovers having just talked to them for a moment. I love and understand myself and commit to engaging with people who love and understand themselves too. For me, in this life, it’s the only way.
So like, yeah, if you fit that description then…
As usual, my son and my breakfast.
