

For me, this is plenty of time to get the content I need to make my brain feel happy and give me a good dose of serotonin, but it’s not enough to make me feel drained or wasteful. In addition to cultivating my feeds, I also set time limits on every network, 30 minutes a day. Since then, I have found my experience to be much more positive and fruitful. I edited and honed in on those accounts that served me, so I would no longer be a scroll servant to them. If I felt like a certain account’s content was no longer serving me? Adieu. If I hadn’t talked to that person in the last couple of years? Goodbye. I went through who I followed on every network, unfollowing every. So I committed myself to getting back on social media, yes, but doing it differently this time. I felt certain there had to be some way to achieve balance and have my social media cake and eat it too.
#Quit all social media professional#
We live in a modern world, after all, and I couldn’t help but worry what being off the grid would do to my professional career as well. The beauty, the art, catching up with friends. It’s childish and vain.ĭespite these new musings, I started to miss those things I’d originally clung to social media for. I didn’t want to lose the sense of who I was and what I liked at the cost of doing what others expected. Why do we feel like we need to share what we do every second? Are our lives that interesting? I wanted to focus on making my life interesting to me. I wasn’t reaching for my phone at every second of every day that wasn’t filled with some other activity. I read more, I watched more television, I felt more present during my work and my social time and my time with family. It was nice to feel like I was a real person, and not someone trying to pose for the camera or watch how others were posing.
#Quit all social media free#
What is looking at ourselves and others constantly doing to our minds, our mental health?ĭuring my month off the networks, I felt free in a way. Not to mention the addiction, the magnetic pull, of the gratification. I didn’t want to look up in 10 years, in 20 years, and realize I’d neglected everyone and everything in my real life for the sake of the scroll. More people are feeling like social media is not a safe place, it is somewhere others go to complain and harass and still try to make their lives look better than everyone else’s. It’s all just consumption.Īnd to me, it seems like this a general consensus. The final straw came when I was watching the stories of a once-beloved influencer admitting to the camera that she felt like her life was slipping by while she pinged away on her Instagram feed and tried to come up with ways for more people to like her, to follow her. I already had to be on it for my day job why spend my free time, my sacred hours to myself, looking at an inches-wide screen? It felt wasteful and like something I’d regret in years to come. Pair that sense of doom-scrolling with a sprinkle of “why can’t my life be more like that” that is so often the result of too much clicking around, I wanted nothing to do with social media. The pandemic, political upheaval, world events, and the general languishing of so many young people left me feeling drained by social media rather than inspired. Over the past year, I found my enjoyment of social media greatly decreasing. It has also been a main way I keep up with friends and acquaintances through the years of high school and then college and now 20-something adulthood. I am not much of a sharer as a private person, but I enjoyed the lure and the voyeur-ness I got from scrolling everything from writing advice to fashion to home decor. To me, social media has always been a place of inspiration. Being the cautious person I am, however, I disabled all my accounts instead of completely deleting them-just in case. When I decided to quit social media, I thought it would be a permanent change. I recently quit all social media for a month here’s what I learned. Social media-we love it, we hate it, we can’t live without it.
