A week without the algorithm

I’ve been online for over a decade - building brands, running accounts, and curating beautiful moments. But last week, I went offline. Here’s what happened.

I’d call myself chronically online. I started a food Instagram in 2013 and ran it for nearly a decade. I’ve worked in social media and marketing professionally for the past five years, and recently, I’ve started building my personal brand, sharing my life more intentionally online. I love it. There’s a fascination and joy in creating, curating beauty, discovering new things, and connecting with people who get it. Sharing has always felt natural, even nourishing.

But lately, it started to feel different. A little more draining, a little less like me.

There’s a specific kind of exhaustion that doesn’t come from doing too much, but from consuming too much. Specially, when what you're consuming begins to override your own inner voice. Suddenly, everyone’s wearing the same outfits, traveling to the same destinations, posting the same captions with the same filters. And somehow, I found myself wondering: Do I like this? Or did I just see it enough times to believe I do?

That blur - between your own taste and the internet’s - is hard to notice while it’s happening. It creeps in slowly, disguised as inspiration. But eventually, the constant intake started to drown out the parts of me that used to feel instinctive: my preferences, my ideas, my clarity.

So, I took a break.

I deleted Instagram and TikTok (not just app limits, which I blow past without thinking) I took them off my phone completely.

The first thing I noticed was muscle memory. My thumb would automatically reach for where the apps used to be, like a phantom limb. I wasn’t even conscious of it. It was like I’d trained myself to fill any open moment - waiting in line, walking home, brushing my teeth - with something. Some noise. Some input.

But once the noise stopped, something surprising showed up: clarity.

One night I sat on the couch flipping through my new Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy coffee table book. No algorithm, no auto-suggested content. Just images and ideas that felt fresh - not because they were new, but because they weren’t filtered to match my past preferences. I wasn’t being told what to like. I was just allowed to feel it.

And that’s when the ideas started to come back.

I was opening my Notes app constantly. Jotting down substack ideas, creative thoughts for work, questions I wanted to explore, and little moments I didn’t want to forget. Not because I was trying to “make content,” but because my brain finally had space to explore.

We talk a lot about content creation, but not enough about content digestion - how even the prettiest inspiration, when consumed nonstop, can lead to a kind of creative indigestion.

The truth is, we were never meant to hold this much input. Not this quickly, and not this constantly.

My break wasn’t a grand gesture. It wasn’t a social media “cleanse” or a productivity hack. It was just a pause. But in that pause, I found something I hadn’t realized I’d been missing: my own perspective.

The world didn’t go away when I logged off, but the volume lowered. And in the quiet, I remembered what it felt like to hear myself again.

Maybe we don’t need less content, just need more space between it. More space between thoughts, between posts, between who we are and what the algorithm says we should be.

I’m not swearing off social media. I love it. But I think I needed to step back long enough to remember that my mind is not a feed. It doesn’t need to be constantly updated.

Sometimes the best thing you can do for your creativity, your clarity, your peace, is nothing. Just a little less input. Just enough quiet to hear yourself think.