Why I quit social media pt. 1

In 2020, the world went into a lockdown. I'm sure you all noticed. And it was really bad for a lot of people, like those in abusive home situations, or teens who relied on their friendships a lot, not to mention all the independent little stores that didn't make it out alive. And I feel so bad for the people who were hurt by the lockdown, and the pandemic in general, this really isn't aimed to be a gut punch towards them, but i'm still gonna say it: During that lockdown I was having the absolute time of my life.

That was almost entirely because of my productivity. I was doing so much stuff, it absolutely blows my mind. I was finishing (at least) one book a week, biked 10 km a week, going on "hot girl walks," getting really well in school (despite online learning, which sucked) and wrote half a book. That is insane. That is actually so insane and crazy and I loved every second of it. But then the lockdown ended, everything opened again and at first it was fine. I planned to just take it easy and accepted that my productivity would drop during Summer. I would just pick everything back up a week before school started, to ease into it. But then my friend died two weeks before break ended. That sucked. And it went a bit downhill from there. For one, grief hit me like a mothe-... something. And secondly, as I started my senior year and went back to my regular irl-school-routine, I realized I didn't like that place much. Apart from literally seven people, I didn't really like anyone. Not enough to hang out with them outside of school anyway. Despite all that I still hung out with people, even the ones that didn't make me feel good about myself. I still kept doing it, because over time it had just become what I did.

As we went into another lockdown halfway through my senior year, I thought of it as the perfect opportunity for another productivity blowout. Except it didn't happen as 'magically' as it had last time. Actually, nothing seemed to be happening, so I started wondering why? What was I doing back in 2020, and why wasn't it working now in 2021? I always thought it was being around other people that kept me from being productive, and in a way it did. So now that I wasn't around other people, how was I not being productive? I was certainly trying. Well in reality, I was around other people. I had made a lot of "remote" friends over the course of 2020, who didn't go to the same school as me, which wasn't the case in 2020. My main way of talking and keeping in touch with these friends was through social media. So sure, I wasn't physically around people, but I was still socializing as much as I normally was. And it was all because of social media. And so, the idea of quitting social media was born back in March 2021...

Note that it's currently December 2022 and I've only quit social media just now...

Why?

Well, I'm a very stubborn person. And sure, I had reasons to quit social media back in 2021, but those reasons were still easy enough to ignore for me. But since then, the amount of reasons has only grown. So, I've curated a list of reasons why I quit social media in semi-chronological order. In this post I'll start with the things that bothered me about social media, and in a second post there will be a list of reasons that I noticed in 2022 and ultimately led to me quitting.

My 2021 reasons:

1. I noticed that the less I'm on social media, the more confidence I have. This makes sense, because we subconsciously compare ourselves to a lot of what we see on social media. I know I'm like the 100th person to tell you this, but don't think you're much of an exception. We all do this, whether you notice it or not. We open TikTok to see some girl who's pretty enough to be a model, and watch as she makes the funniest video you've seen all day. You check out her account and you find out she's actually a climate activist, who lives on a beach with her best friends and also posts pep talks and videos to help people take care of themselves if they have mental health issues. And to top it all off, she's been in a stable relationship with a hot guy for 3 years and they have a podcast together. Sure, that's great, but it made little teenage me feel like I wasn't enough. That's not the girl's fault, but it doesn't change the fact that I was laying in bed, wondering why I didn't live in a beach house. And why didn't I have a podcast? Someone told me I was starting to become a real "it-girl", so should I start doing yoga, just like all the other "it-girls"? The real question is, why am I asking myself all those questions, when I was perfectly fine with my life just a day ago. Sure, my life is good and all, but I go online and everyone's lives are G R E A T all day every day. So why isn't mine? I hope you can figure out the faulty reasoning behind this on your own. I'm just saying, most of us are addicted to this thing that is actively worsening our mental health, and yet we check our insta feeds and send out our 'streaks'-snap every day. It looks so harmless, watching 'just one more' TikTok-video, but it's much bigger than that. If you look at the bigger picture, how many times have you said 'just one more'? How many times have you picked up your phone to check one simple thing and suddenly a whole hour has disappeared?
2. My timeline didn't show me what I wanted to see. What I wanted was to see a semi-equal mix of things like news, my remote friends, political stuff and instagram-therapists. Now, since I followed approx. 600 people at that time, I obviously didn't expect this to happen. But still, logically I would expect some kind of mix. Instead, I barely got to see news or my remote friends. And so, as a result I unfollowed at least 400 people (fun fact, I got locked out of my account multiple times as I was doing this), to kinda push back the algorithm a bit. And while this was working a lot better, I still had to actively overthink the accounts that I followed. I would like to follow a few zodiac sign-related accounts, but the algorithm pushes that kind of content so much, that I would see five different versions of my horoscope in one scrolling-session, and none of them would answer the ultimate question: Would I ever be truly satisfied with my life if I continued scrolling like this every single day?
3. I'm an introvert, which means social interactions drain me, and alone time is when I thrive. By staying off social media, I'm reducing the amount of social interactions, making me feel less easily overwhelmed. And I'm also increasing my alone time, which makes my introvert brain happier.
4. I want to focus more on me and on how I view/live my life. I felt like I was doing that already to a certain extent, but I wanted to fully commit to this mindset. If anyone judges me for the way I live my life, I want to not give a crap about it. I don't want to find myself in a situation where I refuse to do something because I'm afraid what other people might think of me.
5. I have enough things to do: I have an endless list of hobbies, movies, books or projects that could keep me busy, but I postpone all of them so I can go on social media. I understand that social media can be a way to unwind, relax or chill out for a bit, but for me personally it had become my favorite procrastination tool. And if you take the thing you're using to procrastinate away, it usually helps a lot.
6. I felt the need to start using my time as efficient as I could. I wanted to be more productive, while also doing all of the things I listed in reason nr. 5. To do all this, I needed a lot of time and energy, and so I put a lot of effort into figuring out how to use my time as efficient as possible. I only wanted to do things that were fun and/or usefull and social media simply wasn't either of those.
7. My social media was not really my own anymore: It's me posting pics that I like, but only if I think other people won't have many strong opinions on it. I joined instagram in 2015 and let me tell you, it was a different place back then. The app icon looked like a polaroid, you couldn't like comments, stories didn't even exist and there were 300 million users. If you think that's a lot, as I'm writing this instagram has nearly 1.4 billion active users. I didn't have many friends or followers back then, so I was just posting everything I could think of, because I liked having a large feed. I loved using the app, because I had a place to show off my posts, I liked playing around with the editing tools, and when they introduced boomerangs- My mind was absolutely blown. But as both I and the app grew, I was introduced to the unofficial rules of instagram, which seemed to change every few months. For example, having hundreds of posts wasn't cool, so I archived A LOT. I didn't delete my old posts, because I genuinely liked all of them (otherwise little me wouldn't have posted them). As my follower count grew, so did the amount of people who had an opinion on my feed. I felt like whatever I posted, there would be something wrong with it according to someone. But I didn't understand why these people were following me if they had such a problem with me posting a simple photo of my shoes everytime I do something cool. I thought it was funny, because usually people pay so much attention to snapping the perfect pic, and that keeps them from truly being in the moment. So I refused to do that, and when people were taking pictures of this cool experience, I would just snap a pic of my shoes really quick and be done with it. Technically I went somewhere cool, took a picture and posted it. 12-year-old me thought it was hilarious. But still, people felt the need to share their negative opinions on my funny joke, even after i'd explain it. There was a running joke that I supposedly had a foot fetish, and the more I denied that, the more true it looked (not that there's anything wrong with that, but it's just not true, and that bothered me). I've archived most of those posts now, because I genuinely felt uncomfortable having them there, scared of what people would think. So basically, it didn't feel like I was free to post whatever I wanted to. And if I couldn't even do that (despite that literally being the whole purpose of the app), what was the point of having social media in the first place?

And there we have it, the first few things that seriously made me wanna quit social media alltogether. Obviously I didn't quit in 2021 though. If you wanna know more about how I quit social media, I'll post a link to that article over here. And if you want to know what led me to actually quit social media, I'll link the second part of this article over here.

Wow, you've made it to the end

Damn, I'm so impressed you stuck around all the way 'till the end. Especially since our attention span is currently about the same length as a 1 minute Tiktok-video. Thank you so much for reading all the way through if you did, I genuinely appreciate it. If you want to read part 2 as well, I'll leave a link below. And hopefully this article helped you in any way, or at least entertained you a bit. If you'd like to stay updated whenever I post a new article, you can make sure of that by hitting the "subscribe"-button on the right, filling in your name and email, confirming your email, and then you're all set!