Last year when I was in the middle of writing my latest book, Natural Care, I decided to conduct an experiment on myself. I would give up social media and see what happened.
I had been getting quite resentful of the time I spent scrolling through Instagram when I found myself once again lying on the couch looking at recipes, pretty kittens and puppies and photos of Italy when I could have been reading a book or talking to someone. Recipes, pretty kittens and puppies and photos of Italy will always be available so why did I need to have a constant diet of them, several times a day?
I was also starting to get annoyed by some people I followed on Instagram. It wasn’t their fault – it was their Instagram account, after all – but I found some of the stuff they were posting was a bit off. Instagram had gone from something pretty to something quite shouty where people found it necessary to parade and fluff their feathers. People I previously liked turned out to be quite different when they were shouting, and this upset me.
Some of it, I think, was due to Covid forcing people to reveal their true colours. A number of people I followed shouted about how we shouldn’t be in lockdown and how herd immunity was the way to go and how unfair it
