How I deleted Instagram for good

By Liam, founder of Companion. Written the week it happened.

Last week I deleted Instagram from my phone. A few minutes later, mid-sentence in something I was writing, I looked up from my laptop and, without a single conscious thought, opened Instagram in my browser.

I didn't decide to. There was no craving I noticed and overrode. My hands just did it, the way your feet find the stairs in the dark. That was the moment I understood what I was actually dealing with. Not a habit. A reflex. Ten years of training, several hours a day, wired in deep enough that removing the app didn't remove the behaviour. The behaviour just found another door.

I'm 31. I'm in good shape, I've a partner I love, I build software for a living, and by most external measures I look like someone with his life together. I also couldn't sit through a five minute wait without reaching for a feed. Waiting for code to compile: phone. Kettle boiling: phone. A pause in a conversation with an actual human being in the room: phone. Every small gap in the day, sold off for nothing.

And for ten years I ran the same justification everyone runs: it's where I see my friends.

Here's what finally broke that excuse for me. Instagram doesn't connect me to my friends. It shows me my friends. Those are completely different things. I could tell you which acquaintance from high school was in Portugal last month, and I couldn't tell you when I last actually spoke to some of the people I love most. I was watching everyone and reaching no one. The feed gave me the feeling of staying in touch while it replaced the thing itself.

So the honest accounting looked like this. What I actually get from Instagram: birthdays I'd otherwise miss, big life updates, and a vague sense of where everyone is. What it costs me: hours a day, my attention span, and, the part that took longest to admit, most of my real relationships, atrophied behind a screen that felt like maintenance.

That trade is insane. I only kept making it because the alternative felt impossible. Remembering birthdays myself. Remembering to reach out myself. Holding all of it in my own head. My memory for this stuff is genuinely bad. Life gets loud. It's not that I care less about people. The caring just never turns into a message.

So I built the thing I needed, because I couldn't find it anywhere: a companion whose entire job is to remember my people so I don't need a feed to.

I tell it about the people who matter to me. By voice note, usually, while I'm walking. It remembers the birthdays, the thing my friend was stressed about, the promise I made to call when the baby arrived. Then it gives me one small nudge at the right moment, helps me find the words if I want help, and gets out of the way. It never messages anyone for me. It never shows me a feed. It lives in Telegram, the messaging app I already use, because the entire point is that messaging people is what a phone is for.

That's it. That's the whole product. Keep the messages. Lose the feed.

I want to be straight about where I'm with this: it's been days, not months. I'm not writing this from the summit. I'm writing it from the bottom of the climb, in public, partly so I can't slip back without anyone noticing. My browser still knows the URL. My thumbs still know the motion. What's different is that the one legitimate thing the feed ever did for me, keeping me loosely stitched to my people, is now handled by something that does it better and costs me nothing.

If you've been running the same excuse I was, I'd delete it, but it's where I see my friends, then I built Companion for exactly that sentence.

Your friends aren't in the feed. They're in your messages, waiting for you to remember them.