'This Is Us' star Milo Ventimiglia explains why he returned to Instagram after 5-year break

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Why Milo Ventimiglia ditched Instagram for 5 years

Top Talkers: 'This Is Us' star explains why he stopped posting.

“This is Us” star Milo Ventimiglia has finally addressed his five-year break from Instagram.

The 40-year-old spoke about the decision regarding the social media platform with Us Weekly.

“I’ve always respected what social media can do, the connective tissue of sharing life moments,” he said. “What I started to see was a lot of projected ideas of how people wanted to be viewed, as opposed to what they’re seeing so I stepped away from Instagram.”

He continued, “But I came back because I was still photographing, picking up little moments in life. It just felt like, after five years of being away, to come back on nearly the same day that I left it … it felt like it was time.”

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Ventimiglia wrote “Finito” alongside a post back on January 10, 2013 -- not posting again until Jan. 1 of this year.

That post includes a photo of the words, “Now Where Was I…”

“Instagram is about contributing to a community that I think is still searching for inspiration, for good, for a view on life that maybe I might offer,” Ventimiglia said. “There are other people on mine that I’ll look at and be like, ‘Oh wow, that’s interesting.’ Or you see a photograph taken in a foreign country and think, ‘Oh, I want to go there.’ I think to get back into the realm of contributing … it was time.”

Ventimiglia has shared a number of other images since his January return. The most recent post on his account is dated February 10.

Ventimiglia previously addressed leaving the popular platform in an interview with The Associated Press in 2017.

“Instagram started as a place, a collective group of photographers and artists, to just kind of share their work and their lives," he said at the time, per E! News. "And at a certain point, after doing it for three years, I saw it change... Nobody was looking at the photos, they were asking me about my acting jobs, and I kind of went, 'Oh man.'"