Step away from your Instagram feed
I don’t know about you, but all this Sad Pandemic Holiday content is really doing a number on my mental health. I haven’t regularly celebrated Thanksgiving with my nuclear family since I went to college, and the last time I made it to a big extended family Thanksgiving was…2012 I think? Clearly this isn’t a super important holiday for me or my family relationships. Plus, I live in a country where Thanksgiving doesn’t even happen. Some years I’ve gone to a gringo dinner, some years I haven’t. It is completely normal for me to not do Thanksgiving. And yet I am still feeling depressed about the Lost Thanksgiving of 2020. Why? I guess because everyone on my internet seems to be…?
If you are also falling victim to this toxic and unnecessary emotional FOMO, may I endorse this advice from Madeline Ducharme at Slate: “The Perfect Time to Delete Instagram is Right Now.”
There’s no reason to wallow in the particular combination of envy and dread that comes from seeing smiling faces of multiple generations all gathered around a dinner table (which probably isn’t even six feet across lengthwise)! Come December, don’t make yourself miserable by scrolling through picture after picture of big families swapping gifts as well as aerosols under the glow of the tree. Don’t refresh stories of your richest friend from college whose family figured out some glamorous and “safe” way to be together, à la the Kardashians.
Instagram is about to rival Twitter in its ability to infuriate you by showing you people’s bad choices. Even their good choices will probably look depressing—or, deprived of context, they will be indistinguishable from bad choices. You don’t have to delete your account if you don’t want to. Just take it off your phone, and leave it off until January 5 or so.
Now, I haven’t scrolled on Instagram since approximately July, and its absence is not entirely saving me from feeling bad about Quarantine Holidays. But I know how much better it made me feel to stop, so I can imagine how much worse the next six weeks or so would be if I had kept going. The pandemic has presented many of us with the opportunity to step away from the social performances that make us miserable. Seize that opportunity! There will literally never be a better time!
I’m going a step further and instituting a personal ban on ALL Pandemic Lifestyle content for the rest of the year, whether produced by people I know on social media or created for publications I usually enjoy reading. I constructed elaborate barricades between me and the news cycle around the election. I thought I would be taking them down at this point, but instead I’m fortifying them. I don’t need the entire media industry to remind me, multiple times a day, of what we’re all supposedly missing. I know what I’m missing. And I know what I’ve gained. I prefer to keep my attention on the second category.