Reflections on Year without Social Media

For some context, you can check out my blog post from last year about taking time off social media.

Last year, I spent pretty much the whole year on social media detox. In the past, I honestly couldn’t imagine that I would ever do that (or that I would have enjoyed it!). But here we are, one year later, and I did it. I survived a year without social media. And at the end of last year, I decided to go back. I’m going to talk about the good and the bad of leaving (and coming back).

One of the benefits was that I had a lot of free time that opened up. For a while, I was able to fill it with lots of reading. I also tried to reinvest some of my social effort in making plans with people (pandemic permitting) or setting up calls. For much of the year, I was able to see people more regularly and try to schedule more calls with friends who live far away. But with new variants popping up, there were times where I didn’t see many people for long periods of time. I have also been experiencing very serious zoom fatigue. I am generally not interested in getting on a video call in my free time unless I absolutely have to. Eventually my good reading habits were replaced with compulsively checking the news. So eventually it felt like the good gave way to the bad once again.

For the first two months or so off social media, I didn’t really miss it but I felt its absence. It was really hard to be disconnected from something that other people were constantly engaging with and talking about. After a lot of reflection I realized that removing yourself from social media only (especially during a global pandemic) is extremely isolating. Removing what little sense of connection I had at the end of 2020 was detrimental in a lot of ways. The reason I wanted to come back in the end is essentially that I felt left out. Not being on social media feels like being left out of a group chat that pretty much the whole rest of the world is in. For better or for worse, that’s the reason. I hope that I can balance my relationship with social media so that I can participate in it. I really like Cal Newport’s advice on this topic. We should evaluate what it is we want to get out of social media, then work out a way to get that without as many of the negatives as possible. It was necessary for me to take a step back from social media in order to fully evaluate what it is that I want to get out of it.

What I missed about Social Media

I came back to social media because I felt left out, but there were other things I was missing. I think because of how we’ve structured our society, with social media at the heart of it, we expect a lot of our daily “connections” and low-level interactions to happen via social media. When you don’t use social media, it feels like you’re missing all of those connections.

Personally, I also felt invisible not being on social media. I think this is something I want to work on even now that I’m back on social media. I think this is part of where the negative mental health ramifications of social media. Part of what we do on social media is present ourselves to be seen by others. At times I felt like I left social media because I was hiding. 2020 and 2021 were by far my worst years – filled with struggles at work, mental health struggles, grief, and existential crisis after existential crisis. I don’t think there was much good that I could have shared, so in some ways not having social media freed me from trying to portray my life as anything other than the clusterfuck that 2021 was. But, in other ways, it felt like I was hiding. I felt invisible. I like sharing parts of my life and engaging with my friends on social media. I do think that’s fun and I think social media can still do that.

The flip side of this is the curiosity about what people are up to. I also want to work on this because this is not a becoming personality trait. I would love nothing more than to have no interest in what people I went to high school/college, celebrities, etc. are doing. But I do care. Not that much, but I occasionally I like to have a look. Until I resolve this deeply rooted flaw in myself, I can be honest that I missed this part of social media.

Finally, I really missed having a place for my photos. I like taking photos and editing them, but then I didn’t know what to do with them. For a while I did some scrapbooking, but waiting for printed photos to arrive in the mail (I wasn’t going to go out unnecessarily, was I?) and general laziness made it too easy to lose motivation between doing something and scrapbooking about it. I love the flow of looking through pictures, editing them, and picking out a few that I really like to share. I felt like without social media, all my pictures were just gathering digital dust on my phone.

What I did not miss about Social Media

Unfortunately part of reflecting on social media and technology use meant noticing things that weren’t exclusive to social media. It felt like once I was paying attention I was being constantly bombarded by advertisements left and right. I don’t think getting off social media necessarily makes it better, but social media bombards us with normal ads, sponsored posts, integrated ads, and more. But I also saw it when reading CNN. You don’t have to scroll down on the front page before you start seeing sponsored product “articles.” Reading the news (in particular CNN) doesn’t really feel that different from scrolling Facebook. I don’t think there’s a solution to this. This is just me complaining.

Something that is specific to social media is the toxic psychological feeling of vying for likes and attention that I have long associated with social media. It seems impossible to avoid the feeling like the number of likes you get correlates with how much people like you/care about you/are interested in you/etc. So you think – How often should I post? What should I post? How should I portray myself and my life? Even now Instagram lets you turn off seeing the number of likes on your own posts and everyone else’s, the pressure is still there to post something that people will like.

I think a lot of the good part about social media comes from sharing. If you’re just lurking, it doesn’t seem as balanced to me. But when you do share, you have to think about all of these questions. If you post polished, swishy pictures, you are contributing to the problem of portraying a highlight reel of your life. But do you really want to post a picture of yourself crying, or a really boring bowl of pasta, or a really mediocre picture of a cloudy sky? Probably not. So what do you do? That is the question. I did not miss mulling that question over on a regular basis.

Social Media Hygiene

When I came back to Instagram, I spent some time tidying things up. I archived any photos I posted before my social media break. That meant archiving about 800 posts. My oldest posts are from 2012. That’s now 10 years ago.

One recurring theme I picked out in books, articles, podcasts, interviews, etc. about being conscious social media use was that a lot of people feel better about deleting posts that are not recent (for example posted in the past 1-2 years). This idea seems like a good option among the less radical ways to reflect and be conscious about social media use. I think anyone can do this. Before this break, I never really considered deleting posts. I’m not entirely sure why. I think a lot of people keep pretty much their whole backlog up and public. It’s quite weird that I, as a now mid-20s woman, kept up stupid photos I took in high school, back when I used Instagram for the filters (so I could post the pictures on my Tumblr!). Social media behavior, trends, and etiquette have changed so much in the last 10 years. It seems lighter and fresher to keep profiles with limited and more recent information only.

I also found it empowering to be really brutal about the accounts I follow. I obviously follow family and friends, but I also followed a lot of public accounts from brands and influencers. I got used to not being bombarded with advertisements at every turn, so I decided to have a strict policy to not follow any brand accounts. That makes things already a lot better. I am also being very selective about public figures that I follow. I initially unfollowed all public figures and I have slowly been following some accounts again, but when I can really identify how the content that those accounts post make me feel.

A World Without Social Media

One thing I proved to myself during this time was that I can live without social media. It feels really stupid to say that. Since I joined social media as a teenager, I never was without it for an extended period of time. I had struggled at different points with my relationship with social media, feeling a strong addiction to it at times. It now feels, in retrospect, that I had submitted to a lifetime of social media. But I know that I can go without it. If at some point I don’t want to participate anymore, I know that I don’t have to. I’m not sure that I felt that was the case before.

Social media is so deeply engrained now. I think it has slowly crept up on us. Slowly it has become more and more central in all of our lives. The pandemic has accelerated this process. As a society, we have not stepped back and asked ourselves and each other what role(s) we want social media to play. And I don’t think we can, honestly. I would love to be wrong about that, but I am fairly certain that social media will continue to be more and more deeply embedded. I think it’s up to the individual to constantly be evaluating the role of social media in your life, how it affects your mental health and lifestyle, and how you can constantly be cultivating a better relationship with it.

It was really interesting being off social media during the social media outages. I think it was late last year when there was a particularly long and widespread outage of all Facebook-owned social media, including Instagram and WhatsApp. These were really disruptive for huge tech companies, small businesses, and people just trying to communicate with friends and families. I was almost completely unaffected (I just couldn’t send messages on Messenger for the day). I don’t know that other people saw it as a glimpse into a world without social media, but I did. Are we prepared for these services which we rely on so heavily to go down at any time – temporarily or permanently?