This is the first of four videos covering different aspects of life off social media. In the next three videos, I’ll be covering Politics, Friendships, and Potential.
This isn’t the first time I walked away from a major platform. I quit Twitter in 2021, and you can hear my thoughts on that experience here. But seven months ago, I knew that the other giants, Instagram and Facebook, had me in a bit of a chokehold. Instagram especially filled the void that Twitter left behind.
There was something icky about playing the engagement game with your life—about the temptation to freak out over an opinion shared, or a story reported from across the country that might only be half-true. I was tired of the dependence on notifications to make me feel seen, even though some of those alerts were algorithmic nudges to satisfy that very itch. I hated that many of my relationships sparked in the real world ascended to the virtual cloud—never to be in the flesh again. Our culture accepts these modifications to human being without question. We stare blinkless at the warning signs and move on as if we’ll somehow survive as exceptions to the trend.
But my rapidly declining attention span at 29 was screaming for a fix. I could either accept the deterioration as a part of the aging process, or I could experiment with elimination. So in October of 2023, I said a permanent goodbye to social media.
In this Identity video, I share how my sense of self transformed for the better after the cut, and how boredom was one of the greatest tools for improving the areas of my life I turned to social media to escape from.
If you have quit, what motivated that decision? And if you haven’t, how are you finding balance between the platforms and reality? Let me know in the comments.
How Quitting Social Media Transformed My Identity