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Would quitting Instagram make us happier?

Would quitting Instagram make us happier?

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Why people quit the app and how they felt afterward

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Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

This week on Why’d You Push That Button?, we try to find happiness. Kaitlyn Tiffany deactivates her Instagram, I support her, and then we chat with other people who have dabbled with deleting the app. Most of them say Instagram made them feel bad, or took up too much of their time, or in Kaitlyn’s case, made her sad after a breakup.

We talk to one of my most on-trend friends, Ryan Curtis, about how he and his wife quit Instagram one day just to see if they could handle it. Then we chat with Musa Nyangiwe, an influencer who quit, as well as Justina Semčenkaitė, another influencer who quit the platform.

With their stories as context, we talk with Sarita Schoenebeck, an associate professor at the University of Michigan, who studied why people gave up a separate platform — Twitter — for a brief period of time. And then, finally, Maggie Stanphill, a UX director at Google, talks us through the company’s Digital Wellbeing platform and how the company wants to give people tools to gain control over their technology use.

Listen to the episode above, and you can subscribe to the show anywhere you typically get your podcasts. To make it easy for you, we’ve also got our usual places linked: Apple PodcastsPocket CastsSpotifyGoogle Podcasts, and our RSS feed.

Why’d You Push That Button? /

A podcast about the hard, weird choices technology forces us to make.

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