A few months ago, while browsing myself on Google, I came across a photograph of myself in a newspaper clipping I had posted on Facebook and immediately understood why people delete things from the internet. It was from 10th grade, when I was representing South Korea in the General Assembly at a Model United Nations conference. The photograph was terrible. I was shot at my dorkiest best, caught mid-sentence, and, from the angle of my face, quite possibly side-eyeing the Russian delegate who was spewing what I had clearly decided was diplomatic BS. I barely recognised myself. I stared at the photograph, winced several times, and then had the more pressing thought: if I can find this in under a minute, what else can people find?
This is the sort of thing that sent me into an internet-scrubbing phase over the past year. I started going through my old social media and removing the things I could no longer look at without wincing. There was a time when I was extremely proud of captions like “life is better when you are smiling”. I have deleted it, obviously, so you will not be finding that biting piece of wisdom on my feed. You will also not find the promotion posts on the 42-chapter One Direction fanfiction I wrote on Wattpad, because that has been scrubbed from the record too. Whatever was happening in that plotline, I would like to make it very clear that I was young and unsupervised.
I had been doing this for months before I saw it played out on Adults. When I finally watched the second season, the opening episode had Billie discovering an embarrassing photograph from high school and going to increasingly absurd lengths to get it off the internet. It was extremely relatable, unfortunately. Adults has always been good at turning the tiny, slightly pathetic problems of being young into entire plotlines, and this one felt on the nose for a generation that grew up documenting itself online and is now old enough to have people from work watching.
There are actual professional consequences to this new visibility too. Recruiters are increasingly looking at candidates’ public social media, with a 2026 SHRM report noting that social media has become a significant part of how employers connect with and assess candidates. Last year, a Rutgers-led study also found that what we see our colleagues posting can affect how we feel and behave around them at work.
For 26-year-old Ayushman Arora, a marketing and communications executive at a finance firm in Noida, this became a concern while he was looking for a job. “I had heard that social media was becoming quite important in the hiring process, and I was worried about recruiters seeing the kind of things I had posted in the past—the house parties I was at and the kind of concerts I had attended—and it affecting my chances of getting a job. So, I first changed my username, which was ironically named ‘hotstuff’, and then started deleting my posts. Eventually, I decided to deactivate the account altogether because I just didn’t want to take the risk. Now that I have a job, I’ve thought about activating it again, but I’m a little hesitant because I know my colleagues might want to connect with me. I just don’t really want them to have access to all that history.”
For 29-year-old Kushal Vohra*, a commercial pilot, the problem was less about getting hired and more about discovering that 16-year-old Kushal had been given access to captions. As a teenager, he was into hip-hop and wrote his own songs, and some of the language he used back then has not aged well. “I’m embarrassed to kind of admit that I used to use the N-word quite freely, which is obviously problematic. At the time, when I was around 15 or 16, I thought it was cool and okay, but I cringe thinking about it now, because I realised how deeply problematic it was by the time I was in university and was given a reality check. I’ve since deleted those posts and hopefully everything is gone. I can control what’s on my feed, but I just hope something doesn’t pop up somewhere else.”
London-based writer Dal Chodha has been operating on this principle for years. On most days, you will find very little on his Instagram feed. He is an avid Stories poster, though, partly because he likes that they come with a built-in expiry timeline. Until fairly recently, his feed contained just a Reel of a Madonna impersonator that he found particularly delightful. Chodha was actually late to the Instagram game, eventually joining after realising that being off the platform was getting in the way of both his social and professional life.
Once there, he had a simple approach to permanence. “From the get-go, I was very, very resistant to this idea of permanence. And that something I put up there becomes a kind of memorial to my life or to what I’m doing.” He treats his feed more like a newspaper than a scrapbook. “Without any kind of intellectual process, I just thought, I’ll treat it like a kind of front page of a newspaper, and I’ll just put some when I’m into it, and then I’ll delete it when I’m not.” His discomfort with the permanent internet archive goes further. “I think I was always very nervous about Instagram for young people, because they had visual record of themselves…at times where they may not be at their best. And I think that’s deeply strange, because I think in some ways it holds you back from developing; you could always be reminded of what you were.”
We spend years changing our hair, our clothes, our jobs and, occasionally, our entire personalities, so why should our Instagram be the one thing that remains frozen in time? For some, the easier option has been to stop leaving so much behind in the first place. Zero-posting has become much more common with people keeping their feeds empty while moving the actual business of being a person to Stories, Close Friends, private accounts, and DMs.
I still post, but these days I am a little more careful about what I leave behind. Growing up online means occasionally having to clean up after yourself, especially when the person you were at 17 has absolutely no business turning up at your next job interview. I can’t control everything that is still out there, but I can at least keep hitting delete.
*Name changed upon request
