Deleting Social Media When You’re Chronically Online

**Tweets from my old private Twitter account

10/27/22 

@Naveed: Karma is going on my Instagram unfollower app and unfollowing the [redacted] losers who didn’t even have the level of decorum to remove me as their follower

11/26/22 

@Naveed: Instagram is so bad for me comparison kills me I think I need to make my life better I simply don’t know how or where to start

12/1/22 

@Naveed: my heart is tired

December 1st of 2022, I confessed to something I never wanted to admit. Freshly entering my freshman year of college, instead of feeling the wave of euphoria that came with a newfound sense of freedom and the budding of beautiful relationships, I found my heart exhausted. And maybe this came from a dissatisfaction from my reality, as my life in New York did not end up looking how I pictured it; I was spending hours in Bobst library closely reading pdfs for my intro to media studies class, struggling to find time to eat proper meals in between studying for and attending my classes (and the dining hall food left much to be desired), and put into the corner of a dorm that closely resembled a suffocating shoebox (without air conditioning during the alarmingly hot summer in New York). My college experience was deflated before it even had a chance to take off. And while the majority of my qualms with my experience can be attributed to myself, I think social media is partially to blame. 

I quickly became bitter and resentful that my shift in lifestyle looked nothing like what I had expected, which led me to raise my first question: where did this imagined lifestyle come from? Why did I imagine myself, a freshman in college, spending every night at a stranger’s apartment, smoking cigarettes out of a fire escape? It is a cliched image, I know.  Part of it came from all of the Instagram posts I saw of strangers basking in the neon lights of New York, or “A Day In My Life In NYC!” YouTube videos, or Tik Toks explaining to me why New York is the new LA. Regardless of what content shaped this expectation, I think it’s easy to see how social media can so easily distort and warp your own vision. And yes, I’m aware of the “social media is a highlight reel” phenomenon, but when you become invested in an idealistic life, it's easy to forget what social media is and for a second to believe in the fantasy it wants to sell.

I would be sitting in my friends’ dorm rooms, and rather than conversing or doing some kind of activity, we would spend hours on end scrolling through our individual Tik Toks. And while I actually love doing nothing with my friends, it began to scare me how much time we spent disconnected from one another and plugged into our separate screens. I’m not here to harp on Tik Tok, or Instagram, or Twitter, or anything really. I think I just started to see what my parents were seeing when they called me addicted to my phone. When I was younger I found their bickering insufferable, but now that I’m on the receiving end, it’s more insufferable when all you want to do is talk to someone, but they’re busy scrolling on their phones for an indefinite period of time. The connectivity of social media that once made it so special became alienating, not allowing users to be present - including me. Not only did I hate seeing the people I love fall into the rabbit hole of social media, but I hated to think that I at some point did the same.

A part of myself so desperately wanted in on this social media craze - I invested so much of my time establishing corners of the internet that I could call mine: I made a YouTube channel when I was 11 years old where I filmed and edited all of the material myself, I made an Instagram “niche meme” account that would amass thousands of followers, I made multiple fan accounts on Instagram and Twitter, only the latter taking off through various notices with my favorite celebrity. The internet and social media was something that I found genuinely inspiring, whether that be through video or photo editing or the content creation that would take hours to come up with. I fell in love with the possibility of finding my people online when the kids at my high school’s primary conversation points would be regarding how their double accelerated math quiz went. But even after finding that, once I shut off my device, I was alone. The “friends” I made online were just that: strangers online. The intangibility of social media became present when I realized my favorite mutual on Twitter had school in 10 minutes, while I had to go to bed. The likes that I received were gratifying at first, but then became a validation system that would plague the way I interacted with any social media. Suddenly, social media wasn’t just about creating. It was about virality, likes, follows, and other quantifiable factors that made it more of a competition than anything.

I now realize that I began to hate social media long before coming to college. My personal Instagram account remained obsolete, as I went years without a single post and even without a profile picture. I became anxious to even post a story, and hours after would continue checking on who swiped up or hearted my story. I left Snapchat a while ago, because I never felt attractive enough to take random selfies of myself and post them for people to see (It also didn’t help that I would watch my sister pout at her phone’s camera for minutes on end as she retook her streaks picture). In the end, I gave into the fantasy of social media: nothing I ever shared online was real, it was hours of picking the perfect song for my story, or the painstakingly looking through my 100+ takes before landing on the perfect picture. I may or may not have downloaded and used FaceTune. Realizing how calculated social media is, I should have been able to tell myself, what you’re seeing is simply a snapshot of someone’s best moments! But when you’re a person so susceptible to comparison, judging and even hating others, these mindsets blur what would have been clarity on the reality of social media. I couldn’t see through the act, but rather, I believed it so deeply that I began to resent myself for not achieving the same as others, if not better.

So … what did I do?

My solution was to delete all of my social media apps (minus YouTube, I needed somewhere to listen to my ASMR) for the new year. I unfortunately consider myself chronically online, so when I no longer had access to the 24/7 stream of media that I was used to consuming, I experienced some kind of social media withdrawal - very dramatic wording, but there were many times when all I wanted to do was to download Tik Tok and mindlessly scroll. A big part of my concerns regarding deleting social media revolved around the fact that I’m a Media, Culture, and Communications major. Social media is kind of what I do. Even when I’m applying to certain jobs on Handshake, they no longer ask for a graphic design portfolio, but rather a compilation of fully edited Tik Toks I’ve made. In all honesty, I don’t have a solution for that, yet. I don’t even know if going cold turkey on social media has resulted in these life changing, rebirthing realizations. The real secret is that my life didn’t become exponentially better because I decided to go social media free. But, my heart isn’t tired. Or as tired as it once was. The feelings that I experience are fully internal rather than being stirred up through hours of scrolling and self comparison. I read! (Shoutout to Goodreads for being my primary mode of social media now) I began to invest my time into things that once used to make me happy - creation. As much as this sounds like a page out of a self help book, I didn’t realize how social media robbed me of any personality I once had. I became a subscriber to the agenda of pictures, posting, being on trend, consuming, etc. When so much of my life became invested in swiping and scrolling, things like painting, reading, or writing slowly became phased out of my daily routine. I’m a lot more me than I’ve felt in a while. And if you’re feeling the way that I felt months ago, I think you’d thank yourself if you took a step back from social media.