Gabriel Basso 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 in Tonight’s show starring Jimmy Fallon On February 3, the 31-year-old actor said he had been aimlessly browsing when he came across a photo taken from the top of the world’s tallest mountain.
The image stopped him in his tracks and, almost instantly, pushed him to delete the app completely.
Basso, who leads the Netflix thriller series The night agent like Peter Sutherland, told Fallon that the moment seemed like an unexpected wake-up call.
“I was watching a doom movie and I saw a shot from the top of Mount Everest. And I thought, ‘Wow, this is beautiful,'” he recalled.
What followed was a sudden change of perspective.
As he continued to explain, Basso wondered why he could see such a hard-won view so naturally.
“And then I stopped and thought, ‘Wait, what?’ Why do I now know what that looks like? And it bothered me that that guy stepped over literal bodies to get there and see that view, and now I was watching 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 represented.
The climber behind the image had dedicated years of effort, endurance and sacrifice to reach that moment. Seeing him effortlessly, as he lay on his couch, made the achievement seem strangely empty.
That realization stayed with him.
“It bothered me to have that image in my head now without any effort to get it. And I thought, ‘Dude, to hell with this whole platform,'” the actor added, summing up why he decided to delete his account on the spot.
Basso also described the situation as “crazy,” acknowledging how absurd it felt to experience something so extraordinary through a phone screen.
His comments touched 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 having a large following, Basso said deleting Instagram seemed necessary.
For him, seeing the summit of Everest without ever setting foot near base camp highlighted how disconnected displacement had made him from real-world effort, purpose, and ambition.
Her story struck a chord, offering a simple reminder that while social media can be entertaining and addictive, it can also quietly take away the meaning of moments that once required dedication to truly understand.
Sometimes, as Basso discovered, hanging up the phone can be the first step in wanting to win over your eyes.
