On May 17, 2020, I stepped away from social media. I permanently deleted my Instagram and Twitter accounts, reduced my 1,200 Facebook friends to just around 100, and deleted all social media apps from my phone.
Stepping away from social media was not an easy decision to make. Most Gen Z people grew up alongside the rise of social media. All my life, it’s been there for me to connect with others and to entertain myself. But little did I know that along the way, I had become subconsciously dependent on it for too many things—human connection, validation, and self-esteem.
This may strike you as a trivial matter, but social media is a very real factor that impacts mental health. Almost one year after I stepped away from the clattering and chattering online, I finally learned how to breathe, think, and act on my own. I learned how to be more content.
Still, I’m not here to preach about why you should leave social media. That’s a decision only you can make depending on your priorities, personality, and circumstances. I’m only here to share my story with you and encourage you to critically think about how you use social media, and how social media uses you.
There’s so much content out there that explains how stepping away from social media has made people’s lives better. This is my story.
PART 1. Social Media Is a Shit Show.
It’s important to recognize that social media has good eggs and bad eggs. In this section, I want to only focus on the bad eggs. We already know that social media enables us to promote important causes, expand our networks, and communicate with loved ones. But no one talks about the dopamine, the pseudo-conversations, and the comparison trap.
This is part 1 of how I got rid of my social media addiction, and it all starts with recognizing that social media is a shit show.
It's all about dopamine, baby.
I used to be a total compulsive social media user. My thumb felt like an external part of me, something that couldn’t stop scrolling through endless feeds. I used to mindlessly flit between Facebook then Twitter then Instagram then Snapchat then YouTube, then back to Facebook, Twitter, and the cycle goes on. My index finger couldn’t stop hitting the “return” key to refresh these sites on my computer either, my brain excited to see the next thing that pops into my timeline.
Sometimes, I would be able to catch myself and stop. Sometimes, however, I would be engulfed in this trance for hours and wouldn’t even notice the time.
There would be days when I’d skip having lunch or dinner outside with family because I had to do schoolwork. But half the time, I’d end up just scrolling through my phone. The second I got bored or had nothing to do or got lazy, I’d pick up my phone and scroll scroll scroll. Picking up my phone and scrolling through social media became, without a doubt, an uncontrollable habit.
I knew I had a problem. I was sacrificing quality time for sleep, exercise, family, friends, and myself for what? Just to get the numbing brain mush I get from being on social media? It’s so easy to say that I could’ve just stopped, but I really couldn’t. I had this strong urge I needed to satisfy—the urge to keep scrolling, refreshing, and reloading sites.
We must ask ourselves then, why are social media sites so successful at taking so much of our time away? Why do people aged 16 to 24 spend an average of 3 hours a day on social media (TechJury, 2020), and why will the average adult spend 6 years and 8 months of their lives on social media (BroadbandSearch, 2020)? The answer, it turns out, lies in biology.
Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that plays a fundamental role in how we feel pleasure. People get dopamine kicks when we eat delicious food, exercise, have sex, gamble, and importantly, when we have successful social interactions (Addiction Center). Dopamine stimulates us to repeat these behaviors because its presence increases feelings of satisfaction (Mandal, 2019).
Now, sites like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok (most social media, really) are designed to exploit how our brains process dopamine (Haynes, 2018). They’re designed like casino slot machines—but instead of getting hooked on the prospect of monetary rewards, you get hooked on social rewards.
Every notification we get—every ping—promises a positive social interaction. Someone may have liked or commented on your post, or someone you follow may have posted new content. And similar to slot machines, these notifications are not only random, but also happen randomly.
Whenever we load our timelines, we never know what we’re going to get. It’s literally like pulling the handle on a slot machine and then awaiting potential rewards (and potential dopamine kicks!) as our screens load. These notifications aren’t delivered at set times during the day either; they’re delivered randomly, which entices us even more to check our accounts regularly. Because checking for notifications is a very accessible dopamine-triggering event, then being on social media can easily become an addiction. And that’s exactly what it became to me.
These are not accidental designs. Social media empires invest billions of dollars to study how best to exploit how we process dopamine in order to keep us on their platforms for as long as possible (Newport, 2019). Social media moguls are “tobacco farmers in t-shirts” (Maher, 2017). But while tobacco companies sell addictive products to the detriment of your lungs, social media companies sell addictive products to the detriment of your attention and time.
This has mostly to do with their business model. Because most social media sites are free to use, they rely on advertisers to generate profit, which necessarily means selling as many eyeballs as they can to advertisers. The more time users spend on social media, the more opportunities there are for showing ads (Price, 2018).
This may seem reasonable, but it has created an arms race for our attention and time, the winners being “those who best use their product to exploit the features of the brain’s reward systems” (Haynes, 2018). This was why I couldn’t stop using social media even though I knew intellectually that it was impacting my life negatively. Inconspicuous slot machines manipulated my brain.
Just remember that “if the product is free, then the product is you.” In the sphere of social media, we are the products, the advertisers are the customers, and they’re all competing for our attention. Our lovely billionaires have truly exhausted the kinds of products they sell, so they resorted to selling the last thing they could. Us.
(If you want to learn more about the attention economy, Paying Attention: The Attention Economy is an excellent starting point.)
The comfort of communicating with people from a safe, closed-off distance.
At the same time, social media wouldn’t have grown so large in the first place if it didn’t fulfill a market need. And aside from convenience, there’s also a need to make social interactions feel more comfortable.
I’m talking about how communicating with others through text messages, likes, and comments is very enticing because it allows us to stay within our comfort zones. There’s less social risk involved because you have time to think about, edit, and perform a version of yourself online.
I used to see this ability to thoroughly control how you present yourself very powerful. I thought that I could finally present a more ideal version of myself, and be less stressed about communicating with others. In person, the back-and-forth nature of conversation follows a rapid rhythm and people have to come up with coherent responses on the spot. If you don’t, then we’ll all face the deadly wrath of a 3-second awkward silence. Online however? You can always leave a message unread until you can think of a good response, drastically reducing the opportunities for awkwardness to happen.
But can this mode of social interaction really forge meaningful relationships and facilitate meaningful conversations? I really don’t think so.
Given that 70 to 90 percent of all communication is nonverbal (Smith, 2020), then text messaging can only afford us 10 to 30 percent of the quality we get from in-person social interactions.
This makes sense. I used to pound away on my keyboard for hours each day chatting with people. It was entertaining, sure, but I’d often feel tired and hollow afterwards. I chalked these feelings off, however, and told myself that because there were real people behind the screen, those hours I spent staring at my phone were spent on legitimate social interactions. But for the amount of time it took to type and wait for a reply—an erratic snail’s pace, really—and to only get the shadow of a conversation, I began to wonder if that’s what they really were.
I know now that we often mistake text messages as an adequate conduit for face-to-face communication.
Of course, I understand how people can find support and friendship through social media, especially for those who are socially anxious, from marginalized groups, live in diasporas, and/or struggle with mental health issues. But text-messaging and leaving comments don’t give the same value as having a lengthy conversation or shared activity in person.
“Social interaction skills require daily practice,” and spending more time “engaging” online than in-person impedes that social aspect of development (Hurley, 2020). Being comfortable with text-messaging short-circuits our capacity to engage with people in real life. Because we’re not used to exposing ourselves to the potential for awkward silences to transpire, we quickly hide behind our phones even though there are people literally right in front of us.
The people closest to me know that I get easily annoyed whenever someone would hop onto their phone right in front of me—while I’m talking to them. There have been countless instances where people would check their feeds or reply to someone else while I’m in the middle of telling them a story.
I understand that they may be suffering from social media addiction like I used to and needed to fulfill the urge to check their phones. Maybe they also wanted to shield themselves from potential awkwardness. I know I have to be empathetic to that. But using your phone while someone’s talking to you is also an easy way to make someone feel disrespected and somehow unworthy of your full attention. It detracts from conversation.
Texting allows us to communicate on our own terms within our comfort zones—to communicate with others safely from a distance. But having conversations that way is not wholly beneficial. Studies show that high usage of social media actually increases feelings of loneliness and isolation (HelpGuide), which may be surprising since social media is supposedly there to help us feel more connected to others. Perhaps it’s because texting, liking, and commenting just don’t afford us the full human experience of communicating with others (only 10 to 30%!).
Of course, I’m sensitive to the fact that the pandemic has significantly decreased our in-person activities. Calling and video-calling our friends and family are perhaps the next best things that we have. I question whether text-messaging, liking, and commenting are similarly adequate.
(Social Media and Mental Health expounds on the importance of offline interactions, and gives you actionable tips!)
Exacerbating the never-ending cycle of comparing yourself to others.
I think users intuitively know how social media encourages us to compare ourselves to others. But just how bad does it get?
Because comparing ourselves to others is a totally natural human thing to do (Pappas, 2016). When channelled productively, it can certainly boost our performance and motivate us to accomplish our goals. But it’s also so easy to tip over the edge and turn this into a self-destructing habit.
Social media constantly exposes you to the highlight reels of other people’s lives. If you have good self-esteem and a strong sense of self, then you shouldn’t have a problem with that feature. But as it is, self-esteem and identity are the very things that aren’t yet fully developed in our teenage years (Watson, 2019), and social media exploded when I was a teen.
I didn’t know then (nor maybe cared to admit) that I was offloading the work of bettering my self-esteem onto social media. When I was a teen, a huge chunk of my sense of validation became external via likes, comments, and views. This numbers game messes with your sense of reality. Did I really do something meaningful today if I didn’t share pictures of it online and therefore prove it? Did I really achieve something important if I didn’t get social feedback on it? Did something really happen if I didn’t let anyone else know?
I wasn’t just a victim, however; I was also a perpetrator of this never-ending cycle of comparison. We should ask ourselves why we post (isn’t it really showing off though?) about our achievements online, and why we share fun moments with our friends online. Because in the end, why aren’t we content with just having lived through experiences anymore?
I’ll be brutally honest. Sometimes, I posted things online because they’re funny and I wanted other people to laugh as well. But sometimes, I just wanted people to know that I was having a blast or did something great, boosting my fractured self-esteem via their social feedback (and more dopamine kicks for me!!).
Now, whenever I see people posting about their achievements or material possessions online, I refrain from condemning them for being a bunch of show-offs. Rather, I remember the time when I too posted things online because I had an unstable sense of self and was dependent on external validation. Hence, either these “show-offs” want to gain political clout, or they’re also suffering from the same insecurities I was.
It’s interesting then, how this creates a vicious cycle that entices us to spend more time on social media. Now that our self-worth is externally determined by likes and comments, we’d want to keep coming back for more validation, thus becoming more dependent on social media, and the cycle goes on and our time further slips away from our fingers.
That’s why I worry for the younger generations. If social media came into my life when I was a teen and already had long-term negative effects on my self-hood, I can’t imagine what it’s like to be a child and already exposed to this ruthless system of social comparison. Because the younger you are, the more are the fractures in your self-hood available for social media to exploit on and erode.
“The development of a confident and stable sense of self is one of the key tasks of being a teenager” (Watson, 2019). Social media, however, impedes this development as it provides a very accessible window through which we can “view missed experiences” (McLean Hospital), making it very difficult for young people not to feel perpetually inadequate about their appearances, accomplishments, and ultimately, lives.
This is why while I didn’t delete my Facebook account, it was essential for me to only have a few Facebook friends. This strategy allows me to be genuinely happy when I see that my closest friends are happy, and to not care about what people irrelevant to my life are doing. Because the majority of the people I used to compare myself to online were people I didn’t even know personally. Isn’t that insidious?
Social media is one of the two biggest external factors that crushed my self-esteem growing up (the other is sexism), and I’m still slowly picking up the broken pieces of my self-worth today. It’s definitely easier to let others build your self-esteem rather than doing the hard work on your own. And social media offers and even entices you the sweet bliss of the former.
Closing Remarks: Finding the Gold in the Shit.
In case you want more reasons, social media also short-circuits our attention spans (also known as the Goldfish Effect; see Peppas, 2020), displaces much-needed analogue hobbies and activities (Mehta, 2020), and may create an unhealthy self-centeredness (HelpGuide).
There are so many resources online, many of them linked throughout the article, that expound on the negative effects of social media that we have to be wary of. I sound so pessimistic about the whole enterprise—and I am—but I’m still on Facebook, YouTube, and Pinterest for various reasons. The key thing here is how to come up with a healthy way to use these sites—how to find the gold buried in all the shit.
It’s also important to note that our social media habits are not totally self-determined. As I discussed at length, psychological, biological, political, economical, and societal factors all come into play. A lot of the articles online do not touch on these broad social structures, which is such a shame because social media’s addictive time-suck is less of an individual failing, and more of a symptom of a larger societal problem.
READ — Part 2: Living an Offline Life where I share my mindset shift and strategies that helped me step away from social media once and for all.
What are your thoughts on social media? Let me know in the comments because I’m really passionate about this topic both on a personal level and out of intellectual curiosity!
If you like this article, you may find 3 Self-Help Books That Actually Help well…helpful. I reviewed Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism in that article, a book that really impacted how I think about social media.
Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death has also shaped my overall skepticism towards mass media. I wrote a previous commentary article that connects his ideas to the Philippines’ unhealthy hugot culture.
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Thanks so much for reading!
— Alyanna
Congratulations for getting off social media. I think you are living a better life for it! I’ve reduced my social media use to insta and youtube because I find myself wasting time scrolling through other people’s profiles and opinions. Social media really warps people’s perceptions of reality and breeds jealousy and inability to think for oneself. I have to tell myself to pause and just STOP sometimes..it is here to stay and it is up to users and consumers to control their use of social media.
Thank you! And it seems like you’ve put strategies in place to control your social media usage too; I’m so happy for you! Thanks also for pointing out how social media impedes the ability to think for oneself. I wanted to put that in the article as well but that would’ve gone into political territory, which is an area of human life I have to read more about before coming up with nuanced analyses. But yes, bombarding yourself with other people’s opinions short-circuits our thought processes. I relate with that!
Thank you for sharing this.
You’re welcome! And thank you for reading. I feel like we take social media for granted too much now, so we have to talk about it more 🙂
hi aly,
i have always wondered why I couldn’t reach out to you anymore. It seems like you ran off from the world. I have always believed that you would do great things and that one day you would contribute something significant to the world. It really saddens me that I couldn’t talk to you anymore, since I remember that we were always close and I can freely be myself when I’m with you (maybe it’s just in my head). But now, I understand you better. Thank you for sharing this. I hope you are doing better now. I don’t want you to feel pressured in reaching out to me or anything. I am really happy that somehow I can still “find” you (through your blog). I also just want to let you know that in everything that you do, there would always be a non-family that is supporting you (that is me!).
Now with this blog, I have also wanted to cut down my social media “intake” but I couldn’t find the courage to cut everything down completely. (1) my school and orgs need me to be active to share posts and communicate with them. (2) I couldn’t stop talking to my closest friends as they help me relieve my emotions and frustrations from school and family.
Honestly, I noticed that I wasn’t as addicted as I was during HS but I still do use it for a few hours. Can you give me any advice on how to start or how to decrease my social media despite these?
Hello Anon!
Haha, I’ve been told that I have a habit of disappearing from the world, so you’re spot-on there 😅 Anyway, thank you so so much for your kind words and support!! Your comment means a lot to me; I can’t possibly express how grateful, moved, and humbled I am by your response. Thank you for being very understanding and respectful about my choices re social media as well. I’m sorry that I wasn’t able to keep in contact but we can definitely still talk! Anytime really, you have my contact details 😊
I’m happy that you found some comfort in this article, Anon, and I thank you for sharing your concerns! I’ll definitely address them in Part 2 of the article, which will come out on Monday. There, I’ll explain my strategies and tips for decreasing your social media usage while still keeping in contact with your loved ones and responsibilities (I know the struggle). I’m really sorry I’m not able to dispense advice right now; there are a lot of factors to consider and I want to be able to discuss them intelligently so that we can make the best choices possible! 😊
Anyway, that’s it from me. Thank you so much again (really)! You got this, girl (I’m assuming your sex at this point lol)!!!
I feel that social media brings out more bad in me than good. It heightened my insecurities, gives me the opportunity to feel envious of everyone around me and made me look base my worth on comparing my downs to people’s highs. I had been “off” social media for a while now a step I took to take care of my mental health so I not only related so much to your experience but I am also really happy for you. I hope you continue to write more on your blog because compared to the toxic environment social media brings your blog not only educates me in a fun way but I also relate to many of your articles. hehe :))
Aww thank you so much, sistersbff_13! I’m glad to hear that you’re taking your mental health seriously, because that’s really really important ❤️ I absolutely relate with the comparing and the insecurities and the envy that you’ve mentioned. I hope we’ll both get to a better place where we can enjoy life more fully and accept ourselves more fully. That would be a dream. I’m rooting for you, girl!