I Quit Social Media for the Final Time. Here's Why.
A few months ago, I decided to kill all potential for my career to succeed online: I deleted all my social media. I logged off and changed the passwords, told my computer and decided not to remember them and waved goodbye to Instagram, TikTok and Twitter once and for all. (Well, since I left, we have all technically waved goodbye to Twitter once and for all.)
According to all online creators, this was the ultimate career-ending move, and they’re probably not wrong. After leaving social media, the views on my videos immediately plummeted. On top of that, I lost contact with so many people. Turns out, many of my relationships relied solely on sharing memes and funny videos. Now I was gone, that form of connection died, and without the common ground of social media, we found we had nothing to say to one another.
Leaving social media was a weirdly frightening move. I’ve done it twice before this: once for three months, the other for nine. Both times I came back because every productivity and online creator guru advised me that I needed to use social media for my career, that it was essential for my branding, outreach and success, and that if I just used it the right way, in a more mindful, intentional way, that I could avoid all the downsides of social media and only reap the benefits.
Well, spoiler, I tried it twice, and it turns out I can’t. Maybe they can, but I certainly can’t, and I think if more of these gurus were honest, they know the vast majority of people can’t.
Social Media is Addictive, but we don’t treat it like it is.
We all know that social media has been specifically designed to be addictive, and like all addictive substances, daily usage is not advised. We know we probably shouldn’t drink alcohol every day, so we save it for the weekends, special occasions or just a drink or two a couple of times a week, but that’s not how people use social media.
If people used alcohol the way they used social media, such as drinking the second they wake up, whilst in bed still in their pyjamas, drinking whilst on the toilet or brushing their teeth, drinking whilst eating breakfast, lunch and dinner, drinking whilst in the queue at the grocery store, drinking whilst driving, drinking whilst lying in bed, trying to fall asleep… they’d accept they had a drinking problem. But with addictively designed social media, that’s the social norm.
Don’t get me wrong; social media and technology have really advanced our potential as a species. It’s allowed us to connect with strangers and loved ones around the world, create careers that weren’t even possible a decade ago, create new avenues for artists and creatives to showcase their work, etc. But also… it’s messed us up in the real world. Whilst most people seem to be thriving in their digital world, their minds, lives, and relationships crumble off-screen.
What Made Me Quit Social Media?
So what finally pushed me over the edge to quit social media once and for all, despite all the professional advice not to and the social pressure to stay in the digital loop? Here are my main, brutally frank reasons why I left:
People Irritated Me. A Lot.
Hell hath no fury like a comment section. The wild and proud display of sheer ignorance and cruelty on social media has hit its peak, and it’s a wildfire no one can put out. Despite having access to the world wide web and an infinite amount of knowledge, people seem more willfully arrogant, ignorant and hateful than ever before. They are boldly proud of their unresearched takes, and I’d honestly had enough.
I have lost patience for reading comments written by those unwilling to do the bare minimum and Google-check their takes before typing them, let alone the willingness to read a single book on the subject.
Before I left social media, I noted all the charities and causes I cared about, signed up for their mailing lists and left the commenters to do their own thing. There’s nothing progressive about fighting with the willfully ignorant and hateful. Still, I can send money to organisations helping people and causes I care about, so that’s what I do instead.
2. I was developing parasocial relationships with my friends.
“Did you see X that I posted on Insta?” was the most common question my friends and I asked one another. Everything was told through Instagram stories, from the birth of babies to engagements, house moves, new jobs, weddings, and graduations. My friendships were filtered through a newsfeed, and when we met in person, we had nothing to talk about because we had already talked about it online. I hated that my friends and I never asked what we wanted one another for Christmas or birthdays because we just stalked one another’s Instagram accounts to pick up on clues, or asked about what we’d been up to, discuss holidays or even share life-changing news over coffee because it was shared on Instagram or Twitter, so there was no need to connect. Now, I’ve forced all my friends to share all the details about their lives with me over brunch or a coffee, and I love hearing them tell me their stories and life updates face to face rather than through a fading Instagram story.
3. People online can’t stalk me anymore.
I was on a first date a few months ago with a guy to whom I was telling a funny anecdote. He interrupted me and laughed, “Oh yeah, I read that on your Instagram.” Firstly, this stranger's casual and confident nature to admit he had looked me up online before meeting me was enough to creep me out alone. More concerningly, the story I told him was about something that had happened to me in 2015… so he had gone back very far on my Instagram to find out about that. Needless to say, he didn’t get a second date.
That person digging through all my past made me hyper-aware of how vulnerable I had made myself to the world. Before, stories were shared online for followers I didn’t know, but now people in my real life were using what I’d put up there to do background research on me. Suddenly, my story and history were no longer in my control: I couldn’t reveal myself and my life story at my own pace; people could dig it up whenever they wanted at whatever speed they felt like it.
Knowing that people could no longer dig up my old social media posts before meeting me or that people I didn’t want in my life, from exes to former friends, could no longer access any part of my personal life was such a relief. Now, no one can be in my life unless I give them access to it directly.
4. I was wasting so much of my life.
There’s no beating around the bush: losing anywhere between four to nine hours of my life every day to a screen when I could have used that time to paint, read, draw, learn a language, study, exercise or play with my dogs was a depressing realisation and a hard one to stomach.
5. The pressure to create didn’t get me anywhere.
All the online creators tell us we need social media for our business. Still, I wasn’t earning money from social media, and I wasted so much time trying to think of something to create for social media when I could have been creating it elsewhere. Blog posts are fun and easy for me to create, but TikToks and photographs for Instagram were not. I never created anything worthy on those social media platforms, and no one needed to hear my opinions on Twitter. The content I made for those platforms was lazy and uninspiring for me and others, and it never paid off financially.
6. It was so ego-driven it was sickening.
I have a job where my face on a screen earns me an income, no matter how small that income may be. It is arguably one of the most self-involved, egoistic careers: I need views to pay my bills. I’m an obvious target for people when they say social media is full of narcissistically driven egos. However, if we’re being honest with ourselves, using this logic, everyone who uses social media is a narcissistic egoist.
No one Tweets or shares a picture or story on Instagram hoping no one will see it: we have journals for sharing personal things with ourselves, but no one uses those anymore because everyone wants attention. Whether it’s humble bragging about how early you woke up today (did you know some people wake up at 5 am every day? Don’t worry, they’ll tweet about it so you’ll know) to just trauma dumping, bragging about their academic advances, jobs, conferences, how much they studied today, how many books they’ve read, how many words they have written, etc.
If people wanted to celebrate these things by themselves, they’d write them in a diary, but they don’t. They share them on social media for attention, and it’s honestly really boring to witness. I was part of this system, I was part of the problem, and I disliked myself so much for it. When I quit social media, I downloaded a little app called Day One (not sponsored). The app lets me add a diary entry with a picture every day. So that’s where I post my little achievements or grievances to myself, nowhere else, and it’s honestly more fulfilling than posting those things on social media. As someone on the internet, I own the degree of egoism I have, considering this is my career, but I can actively minimise the extent of my egoism.
7. I was becoming a more negative person.
Social media has been proven to not only be addictive but to profit from and promote negativity, something which I will write about in depth at another date. As a result, we are more negative as users of these platforms. Unrealistic expectations, toxic self-comparison, cyberbullying, negative comments, and fighting online in the comment section have proven to lead to higher degrees of depression, anxiety, anger issues, body image issues, unhealthy sleep patterns and low self-esteem. I was so susceptible to falling into a dark spiral from something I’d read or seen online; it affected my productivity, social life, mental well-being and overall happiness.
I was always connected to the internet in some way, even when I wasn’t online because whatever I’d seen or read haunted me long after I turned off the computer or put down my phone. That negativity could haunt me for days or weeks, repeating itself daily.
There were many nice things to look at online, from funny cat videos to gorgeous artwork, but one negative thing would cloud my memory, and the feeling it gave me would linger far more than anything positive I saw online ever did. I was becoming so misanthropic and frustrated. I was getting angry with people I didn’t know and felt hopeless, and I was not too fond of this version of myself; it wasn’t me. I’m a cheerful person offline, but that was becoming polluted by my online life, and I needed to sever the ties for my well-being.
Conclusion.
Sure, one could argue that removing myself from social media is me burying my head in the sand, but there’s only so much I can do. I can’t set myself on fire to keep others warm, and I can only support so many causes and people financially and mentally. So I have chosen charities and organisations I now follow the newsletters of. I dedicate myself to doing some active and tangible good for these select few organisations rather than spreading myself thin over comment sections for everything and anything I cared about whilst making no positive change for them.
You may love social media, but for me, the positives I got out of it were outweighed by the monumental negatives I took away at the end of every day. Yes, I may have screwed myself over in the business world, and my career online may be dying out. Still, I can’t put a price on the inner peace I feel knowing that I’m no longer accessible all over the internet, that my private life is private, and that I don’t have to perform in every possible window or respond to absolutely everything and react perpetually every hour of the day to every update thrown my way.
I am one person, and I can only live so much life: I can only give, care and be so much, so taking away social media has allowed me to live within a much smaller space that’s not only physically and mentally manageable for me, but more enjoyable.
