A couple of weeks ago, I deleted my only active social media account.
I’ve been active on some form of social media or other for around 20 years, which is pretty typical of people my age. Most of us heard about MySpace or Facebook and eventually created an account, collected a few “friends” there, and maybe moved on.
Since then, we’ve spread out widely. X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, and TikTok, along with Facebook are what we usually think of when we say “social media.” Beyond that there’s a swathe of platforms that have some combination of user generated content, commenting, sharing, and algorithmic feeds, from YouTube to Twitch to Reddit.
And I’m hoping to be done with them forever, at least in a personal capacity.
No more accounts, no more posting, commenting, liking, sharing. I’m done.
It’s well known that social media is a two-edged sword.
The early days of Facebook were filled with stories of people reconnecting with old friends and even family members they hadn’t seen in years.
But there were also obvious downsides. Harassment and bullying thrived, and misinformation and conspiracy theories spread through the platforms like wildfire.
Even if you avoided those pitfalls, social media had an effect all its own.
The cumulative impacts have been widely studied – social media can exacerbate anxiety, depression, poor body image, and pervasive fear of missing out. The algorithms, the likes and shares notifications, they’re all designed to keep us scrolling and posting, giving more and more of our time to the screen, whether it makes us feel worse or not.
Like a lot of reporters, I gravitated towards Twitter early on. The steady stream of news and commentary and jokes was borderline addictive.
But over time, I noticed that it had a tendency to ratchet up my anxiety. Not too much, but it was a constant background element in my life. I tried a number of ways to push back on this, including taking the app off my phone, unfollowing or blocking aggravating accounts. This helped, but wasn’t a complete solution.
For the past couple of years, I’ve been on Bluesky, the Elon-Musk-free Twitter clone, and I followed a lot of smart, funny people. For social media, it’s relatively non-toxic. So why leave?
The last straw was noticing how many times in a day I would read an article, or see something interesting, or have a funny thought, and my first reaction was always “How could I make that into a post?”
Social media had trained me to post, and posting-brain wouldn’t leave me alone. I hated the way it forced my thoughts into a Twitter-shaped box.
So I deleted my account.
It’s only been a little while, but my attention span seems to be a little bit better. I’m reading more (novels, not posts).
I still catch myself thinking “That would make a great post!” but less often.
How little I miss it has been a pleasant surprise. Social media worked hard to make me stay, but the truth is, as with many products pushed on us, we can get along just fine without it.