Social media apps: I can find a point to most of them, if I bend it to my own will. Facebook I can use to keep up with certain obscure hobbies, Twitter I can use to mock breaking news on rioters, Pinterest I can use to store pictures to study (not cupcakes or bent penises before you ask). Blogs have their point – I can say fuck and soapy tit wank, and the whole world can read it if they’ve nothing better to do.

But there’s one app I absolutely despise with a passion usually reserved for the films of Eli Roth. Fucking Instagram.

In a dark, dark wood there was a dark, dark house. In the dark, dark house was a dark, dark room. And in the dark, dark room there was a pillock with a camera wafting a Polaroid image in the vague hope it would turn into a masterpiece of photography. Instead it’s an orange and brown out of focus shot of you and your sibling sat in your brown and orange living room, probably with a chocolate gateau, or cheese and pineapple on a stick. You’ll probably have cords, a bowl cut and a terrible jumper that Noel Edmonds would happily kill you for.

Seventies photography was shit. No-one looks at seventies photos with happiness. All you remember is the flash bulb that blinded you for 20 minutes or the memory of that dirty basement where Uncle Pete told you to get changed into your swimming costume. So why would anyone invent a heaving pile of app dung that takes clear images and turns them into a brown seventies mush?

Hipsters. Hipsters with social media followers they have never met. About a year ago some cock I know started posting Instagram pictures on his news feed every two hours. Of beer. Or a glass of wine. Selfies in a bar. I’m of an age that I know what a glass of beer looks like, and I can even remember how it looked in the seventies: pretty much the same. This grainy, distorted image is not clever or arty – it is fucking brown. Coffee, chestnut, sepia, sienna, copper, rust, BROWN.

Fifty shades of the fucking thing does not make something attractive. You’ve basically put a filter on to make it look old and shit. You might as well wear flares, nylon and waltz about drinking Babycham.

Still the pictures flood my news feed. “Here we are at a party, doesn’t it look great all smudgey.” Nope, ‘fraid not, you look like wankers. “Oooh look we’re in the countryside; don’t these leaves look great in sepia?” Wait for Autumn you bellend. The Instagram app seems to make these clowns feel they’re artistically retro, and yet current. It is zeitgeist.

Pass the sick bowl.

And above all, it’s the choice of subjects – so incredibly boring. Who the hell wants to see a grainy picture of your cat, some food you’ve paid too much for in a restaurant, or your mates attempting to do impressions of Kanye West?

No-one with half an ounce of sanity. But I’ll say this: it has one use. I now use it as a way to cull my Facebook friends, so separate the multi-coloured wheat from the brown, brown chaff. If you use Instagram, you’re clearly past the point of no return and deserve a good culling, among other things.

It seems hard to believe that anything that went on in the 80s could possibly beat life as it is today. The streets smelled of dog shit and cigarettes, and children were wearing highly flammable and toxic materials that saw many a garishly-dressed young’un burst into flames just from walking by a 40watt bulb. We were restricted to four channels and usually only one TV with a broken remote per household. And a computer? No chance.

Yet here we are in the 10s where dog shit and cigarettes are outlawed, fashion no longer dictates that children should wear fluorescent crepe-paper tracksuits and we have more channels than we know what to do with. Computers are everywhere; in every room in our homes, at work, in our cars and in our pockets. At any given moment you are never more than an arm’s length away from computerised technology. It’s a marvel, but it comes at a price.

The price we pay for the pleasure of having all knowledge – some of it powerful, some of it pointless – at our fingertips is the gargantuan rise of Facebook. Never before have we known so much about people we barely know, and every generation that follows will never fully understand discretion and privacy.

It was a long time coming, but I knew I had to get off it. I tried cutting down at first. But that’s just like a junkie trying to get clean by keeping a stash of gear under their bed, just in case they need it. I removed the app from my phone, but I had my login and all my notifications still on the go, and do you know what happens when you’ve got an active Facebook account but don’t log in? It fucking stalks you.

Like a creepy dealer loitering outside your house and knocking on your door once in a while to check if you want a little bit of crack to take the edge off your withdrawal symptoms, every few days you’ll get an email from the bloody thing trying to entice you back. It’s a pretty lame effort of enticement, of course, things like “see what <insert name of person you worked with 8 years ago> has been up to”, “here’s what you missed! <insert pictures of people’s dinner from the latest news feed>”. Hardly the grade A gear your dealer might rope you back in with, but it keeps the dull curiosity alive in the background.

If Facebook is the dealer then being able to spy on other people’s pretend happiness is the crack. And it’s not that I resent their success and happiness. There is the undeniable urge to compare your own circumstances, shitty or otherwise, to the lives people choose to portray and it’s easy to become resentful of what you don’t have, but more than that I just don’t think posting the few seconds of pleasure we truly get in our lives is really necessary. Does having five people you used to work with “like” a picture of your face really make your face any more likable? Will tagging yourself and your mates in your local pub give your night out that extra zing it might otherwise lack?

As leaving the account dormant just encourages it to harass you, I decided I had to do the only thing that I knew would make it shut up and leave me alone: I deactivated it. And that was six months ago. It was blissful. You don’t realise the head-rattling racket that thing makes when you’ve got it on every device you own. You regain some peace and equilibrium that’s been absent since you began living your life through that website.

Not once have I looked back on my decision to depart with anything other than self-congratulatory pride. I haven’t missed those long, lonely hours spent grimly scrolling through the newsfeed. I haven’t missed that gut-churning feeling of dread following a night out when you reach for your phone, crusty tears dried around your eyes, as you’re bombarded with images of your sweat-drenched, ruddy face gurning into someone’s camera, every picture tagged so distant relatives will be able to see just how inappropriately you’re living your life.

I do believe in progress and I do believe in choice. The fact we have progressed far enough technologically to give people the choice to share every bit of their lives and to engage with people from across the world at the touch of a screen is something else. Something we never could have dreamed of 30 years ago when our noses were pressed against the screen on the hulking great box in the corner of our living rooms.

I still have a choice to make: I can entirely disengage with the online community by removing my account completely, following the arbitrarily painstaking process they’ve come up with to put people off from doing so, or I have to accept that progress has brought us to a place where our actions, words, geographical locations and drunken misdemeanours can and will be uploaded at any given moment.

Until that point, I may well be at home wearing a vintage piece of bin-bag inspired sportswear and walking perilously close to a naked flame. But the beauty is no one will have to know about it.