life without social media
reflections on my time away from digital realities
today marks two weeks that i have not been on instagram. i deactivated my twitter back in november 2021 and getting off of both of these platforms has done wonders for my brain. i rarely think about it as much as i thought i would. i feel relieved and free. the trees are colorful again, my laughter is louder, music has become something to feel and not just listen to. i feel thirteen again. i am more interested in looking people in their eyes and seeing them instead of viewing them for a quick hit of dopamine.
people become more real when you aren’t filtering them through the things you see online: the memes, the reels, the tweets, the tik tok videos. people aren’t just bodies and faces, edited images, or highlights, but bodies and faces with names and stories to tell, wounds, fears, hopes, and dreams. there is an interior world you can see, feel, and get to know that social media doesn’t allow.
social media is an infection, a cancer of sorts. you spend all day looking at these images and that’s all they are: images, pixels merging together. you look at all of these beautiful people, beautiful clothes, all of these things you do not have or never will be and it seeps into you like a silent plague. you look at your ordinary life and your struggles and miss the forest for the trees. you think to yourself, “i should be this and that. my life should be like that and like this,” and it consumes you. it consumed me even though i knew better.
at one point, i wanted to model my life off of the things i saw online. i wanted to become someone without jagged edges, fragments, and stories about woundedness. i wanted to be someone that fit into the mold of what it meant to be “presentable” “viewable” and worthy of the flick of a thumb resulting in a “like” or a “follow,” but i am not something to be “viewed.” i cannot condense my existence and what it means to be me into an “aesthetic” for entertainment purposes. social media made me feel rather small.
social media does this to so many people, the way it distorts and reduces the being into nothing but a face, an avatar, a digital persona. i felt like a rat chasing cheese every time i allowed myself to fall victim to an algorithm that rarely, if ever meant me any good. my feed was filled with posts about how to be this, how to be that, how to combat the depression and anxiety one experiences, and let’s not forget the millions of posts on how to not be “toxic,” and what it means to be “toxic.” i thought this was okay for a while until i started wanting to become someone that never yelled, cursed, felt angry or annoyed. i wanted to be something other than human. i wanted to be a decoration that looked pretty.
social media doesn’t leave room for people to be organic, to grow without infringement, to experience life without a chip on the shoulder. indulging in social media injected a voice into the back of my mind that anxiously told me about how there was more to life and how i was a failure for not exhausting myself to have it. more money, more clothes, more followers, more likes, more views. everything is a commodity. i want to be more rather than appear to have more. social media is a dream in the way everything on there is illusory.
i grew tired of social media and the exhausting cycles that came with it. log in, log out. delete the apps, reinstall them. take a break for two days and call it a “digital detox.” become “mindful” of the way i was using it then reverting back to scrolling for minutes that turned into hours. i grew tired of clicking an app 10, 20, 50 times a day. i grew tired of scrolling knowing that i wasn’t a person, but another data point for an algorithm. there was nothing organic about consuming things that had no real impact on my life every single day. there was nothing valuable about ingesting things i wouldn’t remember the next day.
social media robs you of what it means to be human and connected to your humanity. these days, i am okay with experiencing boredom. i find joy in finding something to do with my boredom than scrolling on an app. i’ve found joy in reading books again and i often reminisce on my school days where i was given a list of books to read every summer and completed the list without interruption. i value being present for myself and my loved ones. i enjoy my life when there aren’t posts telling me that i should feel bad about it. i value my privacy and not sharing every moment of my life with people who don’t actually care about me in real-time. i am no longer subjecting my brain to celebrity drama, negativity, the thoughts and opinions of others. i don’t feel as bombarded and heavy as i once did.
i don’t know if i’ll ever log back onto instagram or twitter, right now i don’t see the value or purpose in it. i feel at peace when i don’t know what’s going on in the world, what’s trending, or what others are finding time to be in an uproar about. life feels so much more organic, quiet, and fulfilling without social media and i plan to keep it this way for a long time.