Gabriel Basso has explained the surprisingly simple moment that led him to delete Instagram, revealing that a single image of Mount Everest made him realize how unhealthy his scrolling habits had become.
Appearing on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon On February 3, the 31-year-old actor said he was aimlessly scrolling when he came across a photo taken from the top of the world’s highest mountain.
The image stopped him in his tracks and, almost instantly, caused him to delete the app altogether.
Basso, who directs the Netflix thriller series The night agent like Peter Sutherland, told Fallon that the moment felt like an unexpected awakening.
“I was scrolling through the disaster and saw a photo of the summit of Mount Everest. And I thought, ‘Wow, that’s beautiful,'” he recalls.
What followed was a sudden change in perspective.
As he continued his explanation, Basso wondered why he was able to view such a hard-won vision so casually.
“And then I stopped and was like, ‘Wait, what?’ Why do I now know what it looks like? And it pissed me off that this guy had to step over bodies to get up there and see this view, and now I was seeing it from my couch,” he said, drawing laughter and surprise from the studio audience.
For Basso, the problem was not the photo itself but what it depicted.
The climber behind the image has put in years of effort, endurance and sacrifice to reach this moment. Seeing him effortlessly, as he lay on his couch, made the feat strangely hollow.
This realization stayed with him.
“It bothered me that I had this image in my head now without any effort to get that visual. And I was like, ‘Man, fuck this whole platform,'” the actor added, summing up why he decided to delete his account on the spot.
Basso also called the situation “farcical,” acknowledging how absurd it was to experience something so extraordinary through a phone screen.
His comments touch on a broader frustration many people feel with social media, where endless images of extreme achievements and idealized lives can blur the line between real experience and passive consumption.
Despite a large following, Basso said removing Instagram seemed necessary.
For him, seeing the summit of Everest without ever setting foot near base camp highlighted how scrolling had disconnected him from real-world effort, purpose and ambition.
Her story struck a chord, simply serving as a reminder that while social media can be entertaining and addictive, it can also quietly drain the meaning of moments that once required dedication to truly understand.
Sometimes, as Basso discovered, putting down the phone can be the first step toward gaining sight for yourself.
