The Case For Quitting Social Media
Is there a healthy way to use these apps?
Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter — we enter these apps seeking novelty and validation. We emerge feeling slightly more entertained.
But at what price?
If social media addiction mirrors actual addiction — which it does — and if we ourselves admit we use it too much — which we do — and if these platforms are designed to be addictive — which they are — then we need to understand what we’re up against. Here’s what’s at stake:
Your time.
Your self-worth.
Your mental health.
Your potential — and everyone else’s.
Your time is under attack
This is the obvious one — social media takes up a lot of time.
All it takes is one click, one harmless scroll, and suddenly we are trapped in an algorithm. We guzzle down low-quality content, rifling through other people’s manicured lives, editing then re-editing our own offerings.
Most people spend 2–4 hours a day on social media. Teens and young adults spend nine.
It’s probably true that overuse of social media is reducing our attention spans. It’s definitely true that it enables a near-perfect state of procrastination.
What’s worse, these facts probably don’t surprise you much. We know most of our time on social media rarely adds anything valuable to our lives, but we continue nonetheless… and this is by design.
“How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible? It’s a social-validation feedback loop. [Facebook is] exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology. The inventors … [we] understood this consciously. And we did it anyway.”
— Sean Parker, Facebook’s first president
The goal is to get your attention and keep it; to exchange your free time for advertising dollars. These are publicly traded giants vying for your attention. The goal is profit, revenue and user growth.
Trained professionals spend their working lives devoted to keeping your eyeballs on the screen. There are programmers, engineers, psychologists, biologists, sociologists out there whose jobs are to keep you swiping and scrolling and tapping away. How can a distracted, bored, and FOMO-filled user hope to compete?
Unless we actively seek to understand and fight these mechanisms, there’s no way we can hope to maintain our digital freedom.
Here’s what we know:
Social media presents content like a slot-machine; most interactions have an element of uncertainty that keeps us engaged.
If we open our notifications, what will they be? When we pull to refresh, what shows up?
The Variable-Ratio Schedule of reinforcement — uncertain rewards for consistent actions — keeps us hooked. We feel like we have control as we interact (we’re the ones holding the phones, aren’t we?) but in reality our brains are being hijacked. The uncertainty of the next Thing is utterly tantalizing; time falls away. We drift in a sea of content, drowning in novelty.
In this way, much like gambling, social media traps us with small doses of dopamine, endorphins, oxytocin.
Poke around on your phone — you’ll see these mechanisms everywhere. Dark patterns and ludic loops seek to control your behaviour. Much of the time, they succeed.
These days most of us check our phones on average 150 times a day. Much of that isn’t even a response to buzzes or beeps — it’s become an ingrained behaviour. When the person next to you pulls out their phone, starts scrolling or typing or swiping, what’s your first instinct?
“Your behaviors, you don’t realize it, but you are being programmed,”
— Chamath Palihapitiya, Former Director of User-Growth at Facebook
Call it “distraction culture” or “procrastination worship” or “the engagement economy.” Social media conditions us to stay in the loop. Their algorithms are designed to ensnare you; feed you ads; gamify your usage
Still, if it was just our attention spans and our free time at stake, that might be okay. Under this view, social media is just one opiate of many.
But it goes deeper than that.
Your Self-Worth is at stake
“It’s a social-validation feedback loop…”
Not only does social media change your behaviour — it chains that behaviour to an abstraction.
As social animals, we deeply desire our identity to be recognized, our actions validated. We want to be understood, accepted, included in the greater community.
But social media takes social survival mechanisms designed for hunter-gatherer tribes of seventy and smears it in front of hundreds — takes critical human interaction and replaces it with cold pixels. More importantly, it imposes social controls that are highly arbitrary, yet still all-powerful. Man becomes not a social beast, but social livestock. The fear of exclusion, alienation, traps us in fight-or-flight anxiety.
Our interaction with social media is:
— a struggle for self-definition… for control over our own narratives and identities
— a struggle for attention… more specifically, for validation
— a struggle for inclusion… to not be alone.
When we post anything on social media, we declare: “I exist. I have friends. I look good. I am fun. I am funny.”
And the validation rolls in; we draw immense satisfaction from each ding of the bell. The problem is, basking in the upside means suffering the downside. And with social media, that means social comparison — status competition in all of its forms— and all its ills.
Your self-worth is defined relative to everyone else. Your social value is measured in likes, comments, follower-counts. Your life looks inferior to certain specific others, and this hurts more than it should.
Here’s what you’re doing: you’re putting yourself out there for hundreds or thousands of near-strangers to watch and judge. You give and receive public shows of support; you feel good.
You feel bad.
Loneliness: when we see others ‘having fun’, we feel like we’re missing out.
Unhappiness: compared to our own private flaws, we feel antagonized by the perfect-seeming lives around us.
Insecurity: comparing a constant stream of people’s highlight reels to our ongoing day-to-day reel.
These anxieties feed back into the cycle; we tag a friend or share a photo, knock off another post. We use social media to try and cure the ills of social media. It doesn’t really work.
If you fear the judgement of faceless others, feel anxious over the need to always appear perfect, are stressed out at the pressure to consistently keep up, then social media takes these fears and molds them into conformity; to always present your best self, your airbrushed self, a relatable, good-looking, funny, successful ‘you’…
This isn’t true validation. It’s validation of a false self, created as a response to other false selves. We end up worrying over people’s opinions who we never would normally care about, craving acceptance from near-strangers and feeling like total impostors.
We are actively depriving ourselves of authenticity. We are conditioning ourselves to behave uniformly. We are consistently closing ourselves off from ideas and experiences not deemed ‘worthy’, as judged by our consumption of social information; as judged by our social media.
Worse, the consequences are not limited to yourself.
Mental Health
“If we only wanted to be happy, it would be easy; but we want to be happier than other people, and that is almost always difficult, since we think them happier than they are.”
— Charles de Montesquieu
Social media perpetuates social comparison. Daily “story” functions, posts, seasonal or holiday or life-event updates; they lead us to compare our lives with others.
When we post about ourselves, we invite others to do the same. As we judge ourselves, so to do they judge us.
You’d think that the digital crowd — the hum and buzz of a thousand compatriots — might help with loneliness. It really doesn’t. It makes it worse. We are facing a crisis in loneliness, and social media hurts those who are most vulnerable.
“The greater the proportion of face-to-face interactions, the less lonely you are.
The greater the proportion of online interactions, the lonelier you are.”
— John Cacioppo, director of Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience at University of Chicago.
Current science agrees, and tells us that social media addiction is linked to — and can often increase symptoms of — mental illnesses like depression and social anxiety.
Note: active participation with social media is associated with neutral or healthy effects. Passive participation — high amounts of observation with low contribution — is linked to negative effects.
Even when we are spending time with those who matter, we use it doing low-value things — scrolling, stalking, tagging — when it’s digital interaction that mimics real interaction that is most valuable. Call or video-chat, or even better, schedule an in-person hangout; these are the empirically-supported (and intuitively human) best ways to socialize.
The benefits of social media.
Yes, social media keeps family and family connected over long distances, brings together like-minded individuals, allows information to be exchanged freely. It can promote wellness, art, and understanding.
The good, however, is riddled with the bad. It’s difficult to foster true connection with others while defending against the constant manipulation of your behaviour and happiness.
Only once we understand how social media harms us can we practice healthy use. Much is at stake.
Your Future — And Everyone Else’s
Constant distraction hurts you. Endless social comparison hurts you, and others. A culture of compulsion — of conditioned anxiety — hurts everyone.
If we continue to use social media the same way we’ve been using it before — mindlessly, obsessively, at the whim of the code — then we are wasting our time, giving up our freedom of authentic expression, devaluing our relationships, and actively corroding our mental health.
Social media at its very worst restricts potential, cripples our happiness, and traps us in a cycle of instant gratification.
The thing is, we could be so much more. We could have more time to pursue what really matters; more energy to create and maintain meaningful friendships, more independence to chase fulfillment or purpose instead of mirrored validation.
The power to change the bad — to practice the good — lies in our hands. Literally. Still, it’s so hard to use social media a healthy way; everything is designed to keep us chasing a social abstraction that doesn’t exist, to feed on the taps scrolls and shares along the way.
Which is why I’m quitting. I simply don’t have the self-control at the moment to avoid these social, psychological controls. I doubt many of us do — at least not unless we try and actively cultivate it. And a fresh start will go a long way towards healthy use.
At the end of the day, quitting social media is an experiment. A shot at being more authentic and less dissatisfied — a shot at digital, psychological, freedom.
If you can’t or aren’t ready to go cold turkey, there are still concrete ways to reduce the bad and increase the good:
5 Ways to Practice Healthy Use of Social Media
— Designate one hour each day, and only use social media during that hour. Push back against addictive mechanisms designed to waste our time.
— Turn off push notifications. Reclaim your focus.
— Stick to interacting with specialty groups and close friends. Use social media as a tool to foster collaboration and face-to-face interaction. Reduce stalking, lurking, agonizing, and binging.
— Eliminate triggers by removing social media apps from your homescreen, and social media bookmarks from your homepage.
— Make it more difficult and less appealing to use your phone: keep data off, charge your phone in a different room than you sleep in, try the grayscale challenge — it works!
Ask yourself: “Is the way I use currently social media a healthy way to express my social needs?”
The answer is probably no or not really or it could be much better.
Now ask yourself: “Am I okay with a system that actively exploits, devalues, and commodifies my interaction with other people?”
Are you?
If we don’t start changing the way we interact with social media — and our expectations of Big Tech — then they will continue to change us. And chain us.
