My Experience Deleting Social Media as a 19-year-old

Rediscovering Life Beyond Likes and Shares

Around this time last year, I decided I was over social media. I deleted not just the apps from my phone but my accounts across all platforms for good; I didn't want a foot back in. A year later, I confidently say I am the most present, grounded, and mentally and physically healthy I have ever been.

What led me to make such a move I largely attribute to one of my good friends in high school. While I grew up partially on video games and the internet, they grew up reading books, going on walks, and spending time with their family. They were a beekeeper, one of the most grounded and organic hobbies I can imagine. Spending time with them was ultimately a transitive path to living more present. I genuinely began to enjoy walking among the trees and spending more quality time with the people I loved, resulting in some inexplicably rich companionships. Social media became increasingly artificial to me, and I finally threw it away because I wanted to live more in the real world. Doing so, unsurprisingly, did precisely that.

The daunting piece was throwing away such a consistent source of comfort for me. Social media felt like it was satisfying my primitive necessity to be a social creature. This was through parasocial means and was far less enjoyable than bathing in real-world connection. I'd pull myself away from my phones and feel awful. Maybe I felt like I wasted time that could've been spent working towards a long-term goal, or perhaps I was now faced with the reality of completing that assignment on time, a seemingly impossible task after scrolling for so long. I'd think I had the power to stop, to not be bothered by social media, denying the fact that at the heart of my use was probably an addiction. If you relate, you are nothing but human.

My favorite way to clear things that keep getting in my way is to make it impossible for them to do so in the first place. Like how the best way to lose weight may be to simply not keep snacks in the house if you know you are a heavy snacker, I decided to delete my accounts for good. This way, I'd never be able to log on again unless I started from scratch.

At first, I felt lonely. Any time I'd usually be on my phone, I felt hungry for some social interaction I couldn't simply fix with some scrolling. Indeed, this pushed me to call my friends more and to spend time with my parents after I finished my schoolwork. My brain was rewiring; it started to learn that the fix to feeling lonely was to reach out to another human.

I learned that our insecurity around calling or approaching that one person we haven't talked to in a while is all in our heads. It turns out that people are always excited when you reach out to them and ask about their day. Can you believe it? Humans like socializing with one another in the real world! Wouldn't you be thrilled if an old or current friend approached you and started talking to you? If that's the case, it's usually how they'd feel. I started reconnecting with the world around me in this organic way. I started smiling and greeting familiar faces. I began approaching people I hadn't spoken to in a while, leaving happy because I knew I could probably talk to them again. It's common for young people who haven't spoken in a while to pretend they don't see each other or pull up their phones to avoid interaction. For these people, I challenged myself to be better than pretending I didn't see them. Each time I'd walk over and say hi, they'd unanimously open up, and I would leave feeling so fulfilled. Again, imagine someone you knew from childhood suddenly came up, addressed your name, and asked how you were doing. Wouldn't that just fill you with so much life?

I'd be lying if I said that you could socialize in the real world for each moment you spend on social media. The simple truth is that people are busy, and they may not always be there to talk. This is another beautiful dilemma: what should you do with all of this free time that isn't spent watching YouTube, scrolling, or whatever it may be?

I was shocked to realize how easy it was to do what I used to consider "hard things," like consistently self-teaching myself higher math and reading for hours on end. I started filling my time with hobbies that had a non-zero return on investment, like scrolling on social media does. I was learning and exercising my brain and body. I started to perceive school as a point of enjoyment and not simply a series of assignments to complete. I found pleasure in things I had never enjoyed before. The great things you'll do with your free time once you suddenly have such an abundance of it are unbelievable. You'll also attend these tasks like never before; you'll lose that self-induced ADHD from scrolling so much. Now, I feel like I can focus on any task for as long as I need to, a superpower I simply didn't have living with social media.

Surprisingly, this doesn't conclude my list of benefits. I'd be leaving out arguably the most beautiful and valuable lesson I've learned from deleting social media. Again, I'd be lying to you if I told you that you could only focus on productive things all day; that's simply not a reasonable expectation for anyone. I had moments when I wasn't in the mood to do anything, but I still could not access social media. In these moments, I was alone inside my head.

When you are alone in your head, you think about things. You reflect, predict, and start to become metacognitive, a topic I could write thousands of words about. Needless to say, thinking without purpose is unreasonably powerful. You will be forced into thinking about perhaps a person, appreciating their more subtle behaviors. Maybe you'll be forced into thinking about a recently solved problem, which will help you build intuition for later problems. In my case, I thought a lot about time. I've thought about the delight of living in an apartment fresh out of university, keeping plants, finding someone to marry, working a job I will enjoy, developing some hard-worked gray hairs, watching our kid hold the finger of my parents, maybe keeping some bees of my own when I'm 70. I know I'm 20, but I'm so content with the current and future.

There's nothing like living in the present and the real world. There's nothing quite like not stressing over the fact that the other person left a Snapchat on delivered for 32 minutes. There's nothing quite like not worrying about checking if someone viewed my Instagram story, seeing if a post got as many likes as before, or ensuring that my social media displays the version of me I want others to perceive me as.

My challenge for you is to try uninstalling social media for three weeks and see what happens. You can always reinstall it later if you can't live without it. It just feels unfair for me not to inform you how grounded I feel and how happy I am from not existing alongside this set of apps. Maybe you’d feel the same. Cheers.