Gabriel Basso has explained the surprisingly simple moment that led him to delete Instagram, revealing that a single image of Mount Everest made him realise 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 had been aimlessly doomscrolling 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, pushed him to delete the app altogether.
Basso, who leads Netflix’s thriller series The Night Agent as Peter Sutherland, told Fallon that the moment felt like an unexpected wake-up call.
“I was doom-scrolling and I saw a picture from the top of Mount Everest. And I was like, ‘Wow, this is beautiful,’” he recalled.
What followed was a sudden shift in perspective.
As he continued explaining, Basso questioned why he was able to see such a hard-earned view so casually.
“And then I stopped and I was like, ‘Wait, what?’ Why do I now know what that looks like? And it p****d me off that that guy stepped over literal bodies to get up there to see that view, and now I was seeing it from my couch,” he said, drawing laughter and surprise from the studio audience.
For Basso, the issue wasn’t the photo itself but what it represented.
The climber behind the image had dedicated years of effort, endurance and sacrifice to reach that moment. Seeing it effortlessly, while lying on his sofa, made the achievement feel strangely hollow.
That realisation stayed with him.
“It bothered me that I had that image in my head now without any effort to earn that visual. And I was like, ‘Dude, screw this whole platform,’” the actor added, summing up why he decided to delete his account on the spot.
Basso also described the situation as “wack”, acknowledging how absurd it felt to experience something so extraordinary through a phone screen.
His comments touched on a wider frustration many people feel with social media, where endless images of extreme achievements and idealised lives can blur the line between real experience and passive consumption.
Despite having a large following, Basso said deleting Instagram felt necessary.
For him, seeing the peak of Everest without ever setting foot near base camp highlighted how disconnected scrolling had made him from effort, purpose and real-world ambition.
His story struck a chord, offering a simple reminder that while social media can be entertaining and addictive, it can also quietly drain meaning from moments that once required dedication to truly understand.
Sometimes, as Basso discovered, putting the phone down can be the first step towards wanting to earn the view for yourself.
Arden Haslett
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