I just vacationed without Instagram and wish I’d done it sooner

For about half of March, I was away from work on a family vacation. We took a cruise through Spain, Morocco, and Portugal. It was a lovely time, and I used my Google Pixel 9 Pro — easily one of the best camera phones you can currently buy — to document the whole trip. All the photos you see in this article come from the phone!

Typically, many of the photos and videos I shot on this trip would have ended up on my Instagram profile. However, for reasons I won’t bother going into (although I’m sure most Americans reading this will know), I shut down all my Meta-owned accounts earlier this year. That made this cruise vacation the first time in the past decade that I’ve gone on a huge trip and haven’t posted about my experience on Instagram or even social media in general.

But you know what? It surprisingly made the trip so much better.

Because I didn’t have Instagram as a “dumping ground” for all the things I shot during the trip, I communicated directly with friends and family instead. This ended up being a lot more gratifying than posting things and getting a handful of likes.

For example, during an excursion off the cruise ship, we visited a winery in Madeira (now one of my favorite places I’ve ever visited). I have friends who are wine-makers in New York, so we sent them some shots related to the winery because they would be very interested in that. We also came across a lot of cats on our trip. In Cádiz, there’s actually a beachside stray cat colony, complete with little houses built by locals for the cats to live in. We took a lot of pics of these cats and sent them to friends and family we know love to see kitties, and they all greatly appreciated them.

This habit completely changed the way I approached documenting our travels. Instead of thinking about getting likes or proving how great the Pixel 9 Pro’s camera is, I just shot things I knew specific people would enjoy and shared them directly. This allowed for multiple benefits, such as making me stay more in the moment of what was happening now rather than worrying about how to capture that moment for an audience later. It also reconnected me to people I haven’t communicated with in a while, which is always a good thing. Finally, it made those people I contacted feel appreciated since I was singling them out, rather than just posting a photo and hoping they would see it while doom-scrolling Insta. Who could argue that making those you’re close to feel good isn’t an awesome thing?

There was one more benefit to this: not needing to spend the time to craft social content. When I send a photo of an amazing meal I’m eating to my foodie friends, I don’t need to think about hashtags, filters, or how to maximize engagement, nor do I need to decide, “Is this a Story or a grid post?” I just shoot the shot, append a nice message, and send it so I can quickly return to being on vacation. After a while, I couldn’t understand why I had ever spent so much time worrying about social media at all.

The one downside to this is that people in my life who I didn’t message didn’t get to see anything. While Instagram has its very notable and well-documented problems, there’s no denying that it does allow you to connect with people in ways that aren’t really possible without it (or without a similar social platform). For example, my kitty pictures may have also been appreciated by people I don’t know well enough to know that they are cat people. If I shared those photos on Instagram, that person could have engaged, and then I would know, “Oh, so-and-so is a cat person, too!” I did miss that.

Although I know most people wouldn’t want to admit it, I also missed the serotonin response of seeing something I posted to get a lot of likes. Yes, I know internet points are pretty hollow, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say it feels good to post something and see lots of people respond to it positively. Without Instagram, I was getting positive responses, sure, but not at the same scale, making it not have the same zing as before.

Ultimately, I think what I really want is a hybrid of these two things. During the trip, I don’t want to worry about social media. I want to live in the moment and share what I experience with those folks with whom I am truly close. But I also want to be able to share those experiences more broadly with people who I’m not as close to, and that’s really what Instagram excels at.

This isn’t enough to make me want to bring back my Instagram account, but it does make me hope that Flashes — the Instagram clone coming soon to Bluesky — is a hit. I’d love a photo-sharing platform I can feel good about participating in. Until then, though, traveling without Instagram doesn’t seem so wild anymore. If you’re a frequent Instagram user, try to abandon it on the next trip you take. I think you’ll enjoy yourself a lot more.