I Imagined My Deathbed — Then I Deleted Instagram

A reflection on regret, attention, and the life waiting on the other side of social media.

This essay is adapted for Substack from a talk I gave at the Menlo School in Menlo Park, California, in March 2026. -Truitt

My Deathbed

Exactly 491 days ago, I imagined myself here — older, at the end of a full, beautiful life, lying in a bed bigger and firmer than the wobbly one in my dorm room.

I closed my eyes and asked myself: when I look back, how will I feel about all the time I spent curating, commenting, posing, and scrolling, and scrolling, and scrolling?

Will I regret it if I never find the strength to just press delete now — to rip the Band-Aid off?

Despite years of struggling to manage my social media use, in that moment the answer revealed itself to me as a resounding yes.

And I felt I owed it to my dying self — to the life I wanted to be proud to look back on — to take the leap.

So I opened my eyes, grabbed my phone, and hit “delete account” three times: Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat.

What I did not know then was that this decision — which I thought was simply personal – would become the beginning of something much bigger.

I had known for a long time that social media was silently harming my mental health and keeping me from experiencing the full richness of life. My algorithm became a mirror of my insecurities, feeding them back to me in ways that kept me scrolling. I found myself living for the aesthetic photos that would come out of an experience rather than the experience itself. I spent more time obsessing over my own feed than anyone else’s posts. I annoyed my siblings, my parents, and my boyfriend to no end by routinely casting them as my personal photographers.

I knew I had something to gain by leaving that kind of life behind. I just did not yet understand how many other people felt the same way.

Because almost every time someone found out I had deleted social media, the conversation went something like this:

“Wait… you really just don’t have Instagram?”

“Yup. I can give you my phone number though.”

“Wow. That’s amazing. I wish I could do that! Can you please show me how?”

Again and again, I encountered people whose gut reaction was not that deleting social media was strange or extreme. They recognized it. Not necessarily as something they had done, but maybe as something they had longed for. Recognizing that they had maybe even tried and failed to regulate their usage of these apps before, just like me.

Delete the app from your home screen. Reinstall it. Delete it again. Download it the next day. Set Screen Time limits. Give your friend your password so only they know it. Log on from your laptop. Give up.

Sound familiar?

That was my cycle for years in high school.

It only ended last year, during my freshman year at Stanford, when I finally decided: enough was enough.

For me, managing my online brand — and feeling constantly burdened by how much it had consumed me — was no match for Screen Time limits or two-day detoxes. I knew that if I wanted to make grey-haired, Cal-King Truitt proud, if I wanted to give her the gift of one less major regret in life, I had to go all the way.

So I did.

My accounts disappeared from my phone, and the pressure lifted.

Suddenly, for the first time since I was 11, my biggest concern when hanging out with friends or going on a family trip was not the outfit I would wear for the cover photo of my next Instagram post. It was the moment itself.

I felt more connected to my real friends than ever before, because losing those thousands of followers clarified who I actually wanted in my life — versus whose lives I had only been passively consuming.

There were also feelings I had not even realized I was missing. Like being at a concert, fully lost in the show, with no part of myself being tugged toward filming my favorite song for my story.

My life, my time, my experiences, and my relationships felt like my own again.

And that is where Reconnect Stanford began.

Founded in 2025, Reconnect Stanford is a student-led movement and nonprofit dedicated to helping people step away from addictive platforms and toward more meaningful connection, time, and attention. We build community around social media sobriety through support for students who delete, storytelling, peer-to-peer mentorship with middle and high schoolers, and in-real-life events where people unplug together.

We are living in an era of profound disconnection — from one another, and from what truly matters. There are many reasons for that, of course. But at Reconnect Stanford, we believe one of the chief culprits is our collective dependence on social media.

This is not a niche struggle. And it certainly is not just about one school, one age group, or one country.

We are living through what many now call a loneliness epidemic — a crisis not only of isolation, but of disconnection. Across the world, people are asking some version of the same question: why, in an age of constant contact, do we feel so alone?

I strongly believe part of the answer is that social media offers the feeling of connection while often silently starving us of the real thing.

And I think many of us already know that.

We have felt it in ourselves. We have seen it in our friends, our siblings, our classrooms, our families. We have watched our attention splinter. Presence thin out. Confidence erode. We have felt what it is like to be surrounded by people and still not fully with them.

Around the world, governments and schools are beginning to respond. Age restrictions, phone bans, and screen limits are no longer fringe ideas. Australia, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Indonesia, Malaysia, Slovenia, Spain, the UK, and maybe soon even California are among the places that have implemented or are considering new restrictions around young people’s access to social media. Something is shifting.

But resentment is not enough.

Wishing these platforms had never been invented is not enough.

And knowing something is bad for us is often not enough to make us stop.

It is easy — for us, for parents, for teachers, for school administrators — to list all the ways screen dependence diminishes our lives. We are very good at naming what is broken.

What we speak about far less is what becomes possible on the other side.

There is no better time than now.

Since deleting social media, by my estimate, I have reclaimed roughly 2,500 hours — nearly fifteen full weeks of my life.

Fifteen weeks.

A shocking amount of life reclaimed in such a short time, once you actually force yourself to look at it. I’ll reclaim full years more over the course of my life.

Reconnect Stanford did not begin with a master plan. It began with a need that was not being met: the need for a place that rejected the status quo and offered support for people who longed to do the same. We started with a list of names — people willing to defy the myth that social media is a social necessity.

And it has grown because people are hungry for another way to live, and because facing any addiction is easier when you do not face it alone.

One member of our community put it this way: being around others while trying to get off social media made what once felt impossible feel attainable. Without social media connecting them to thousands of acquaintances and mutuals, they could focus on the people who truly mattered.

That is the thing I wish someone had told me sooner: there is a whole new way of life waiting on the other side of the endless management of an online self.

I cannot get back the life I allowed social media to steal from me.

Not the hours I spent curating instead of living.

Not the moments I was physically present but mentally somewhere else.

Not the people I was with while I was somewhere else entirely.

None of it.

What will matter, in the end, is whether I was present — for myself, for the people around me, for my life — while I still had it.

And while you are still here, it is not too late to realize that for yourself too.

The following quote lives on the Reconnect Stanford website:

“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.”

Many people wish they could go back to some pre-social-media world, or at least to the version of themselves that had not yet been so thoroughly shaped by feeds, posting, comparison, and performance. But we cannot go backward. We only get to decide what we do now.

Maybe that means deleting everything.

Maybe it means admitting, honestly, that you want to work hard to change your online habits.

Maybe it means finding one other person who feels the same way and refusing to do this alone.

Because that is what I have learned from Reconnect Stanford: deleting is hard, but staying deleted is a social act. Social problems require social solutions. The difficult act of stepping away becomes much more possible when you do it together.

So here is the question I will leave you with:

What would your deathbed self think?

Would they be glad you gave so much of your life away to scrolling through things that you won’t even remember in the end?

Or would they wish you had looked up sooner?

The good news is this: there is no better time to look up – to reclaim a life that feels more like your own – than now.

Founded in 2025, Reconnect Stanford is a Stanford student-led movement & non-profit dedicated to helping people step away from addictive platforms and toward meaningful connection, time, and attention. We build community around social media sobriety through stories, support for students who delete, peer-to-peer mentorship with middle and high schoolers, and events where peers disconnect together.

To learn more and support our cause, visit reconnectstanford.org. To submit a guest piece, email reconnectstanford@gmail.com.

About the author: Truitt Flink is the co-founder and President of Reconnect Stanford. Raised in Austin, TX, she is a second-year design student at Stanford University. She deleted her social media accounts in 2024.