🌻In defense of social media
What I learned from three months off the socials
Friends, let me tell you, the last three months without social media have been glorious.
Time out: Do you need part 1 of this story? Read it here: 🌻20 years of social media. OK, time in.
I quit social media in November. Here’s what I learned.
For the first few weeks, it was blatant how addicted I was to the apps. Every time I had my phone out for something, when I was done with the task at hand, my thumb would automatically navigate to where the Instagram app used to be. And I really mean every time and I really mean automatically. It was CREEPY and also very much vindicated my decision to quit. I was no longer choosing to use social media, it was something that was happening to me.
The occasional desire to post never left. In fact, this started years before, with the fall of #ScienceTwitter, my all-time favorite platform. Any time I think of something clever or funny, a little one-liner, I think, “that’d make a great tweet,” and then remember, “oh right, Twitter died in 2022.” It felt like reaching for the phone to text a dead relative. That might be an insensitive comparison, but the parallel is clear, I think. For a while I’d try turning the thought into a text to a friend, but that habit never stuck. Nor did posting to Bluesky. It wasn’t the same.
The most surprising change was that I started enjoying taking photos again. I had no idea social media had totally ruined my desire to snap random photos to document what I’m doing. Apparently, the subconscious running commentary of “is this good enough to post to Instagram?” whenever I had my camera out was making me not even want to take pictures. If I didn’t feel like “trying” to take an “Insta-worthy” photo, then I wasn’t motivated to take any photo at all. I had no idea this had happened!
I realized the change when we were visiting friends in Michigan in December. I suddenly wanted to snap a photo of everything. These photos are for my eyes only and they don’t have to look any certain way at all, and my smudgey lens and blurry shots are totally fine. (I never understand how, in the year of our Lord 2025, photos taken on a fairly-recent Google Pixel are STILL BLURRY!) And now, in five years Google Photos will say “remember your trip to Lansing?” and I will see my friends, and too-dark photos from inside the Green Door, and shots of the Christmas balls taken through the dirty windshield while driving down Michigan Ave. I love these photos.
Oh, and obviously, my screen time is the lowest it’s been since screen time was a thing.
Man, social media’s the worst!
A friend recently shared an article (“It's Time to Quit Zynstagram,”) that perfectly described my feelings. You should really read it, the premise is that social media is the new smoking. It’s certainly thought provoking even if you disagree.
After I read it, I doubled down on quitting.
I removed all mention of social media services from my marketing business website. I had a brief existential crisis about whether I could even be a content marketer who not only doesn’t offer social media services, but also who isn’t on social media and therefore isn’t up on what’s trending in the digital world. But then I re-read “It’s Time to Quit Zynstagram” and steeled my will. Go away, social media, no one likes you! Someone needs to quit first, maybe that someone is me!
Sigh.
And then.
Last week, my church small group had a really good conversation about social media. I wasn’t even there. LOL. I was home sick, my husband filled me in. This semester we’re reading a book called The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, and it’s all about slowing down and chilling out, a lot of which comes from jettisoning all the worthless time-sucks in your life. Like social media. But the idea that stood out to me from the conversation was: Social media is not worthless, though. It keeps us connected to our friends, and connected to what’s happening in the world. What if we want that?
I thought: I mean, I guess, sure. But why not talk to your friends directly? And get the news direct from a news outlet?
The next day, I was down in Overland Park for my biweekly professional development cohort, The Thread KC. It was my turn to be in the hotseat for our Mastermind Group, and I used my time to pose the question to the group: Can a person be a digital content marketing professional and not be on social media? The answer seemed to be, “it’s your business, you can do whatever you want,” but that wasn’t fully satisfying to me. (The other answer was, “of course social media doesn’t get direct results, that’s marketing for you,” which made me feel slightly better about the whole thing.)
Later that same day, we had a conversation during our workshop about networking and other professional interactions with strangers. A bunch of different women said that before entering a situation like that, they’d brush up on local news, or recent sports happenings, or at minimum global current events. “You don’t want to be the only one in the room that doesn’t know that there was an air strike that morning.”
OK, confession time: I didn’t just quit social media in November. I quit following the news as well. Literally been living under a rock over here. It’s me, hi, I’m the only one in the room that doesn’t know there was an air strike that morning. Hmmm.
Then, at happy hour, it came up multiple times that people are using TikTok like I use Google. Wow, I am suddenly a dinosaur. Planning a vacation? Looking for recipes? How about date night ideas in Kansas City? Want to check out a business or organization? They were like “yeah I hardly ever use Google anymore.” Fam these were not Gen Zers, these were grown ass, professional women wearing blazers and sipping pinot grigio! W H A T is h a p p e n i n g ! ! ! ! !
Meanwhile… I’ve missed my friend news. I can talk a big game about how I don’t need social media because I’ll reach out to the people I care about directly. As it turns out, my bandwidth for that is very, very low compared to the number of people I would genuinely love to know that they got engaged, or finally got pregnant after years of trying—or just had a miscarriage and are devastated. I don’t want to miss that stuff. And sure, there are mind games you can play here, saying well are you really that close to that person if you weren’t talking to them outside of social media, to which I say, bugger off! There are very few people who will call or text me directly with every life update, and I’m not willing to write off everyone else.
I’ve had multiple conversations in the last few months that went like this.
Friend: [passing mention of thing that happened]
Me: Huh? [thing] happened?!
Friend: What, you didn’t know?
Me: No!!
Friend: It was on Instagram!
Me: I quit Instagram!
Friend: Unbelievable! Well, look! [Pulls out phone, shows me Instagram post]
Ugh!
So.
I do still kind of think the whole world should quit social media. But until that happens, I have decided that I don’t need to be the trailblazer on this one. And although I will continue to be a dinosaur (i.e. I’m not replacing Google with TikTok any time soon, are you nuts), I am getting back on social media.
With some caveats.
First, I want to focus on friends. Sources say the current algorithm for your Instagram home feed shows you about 50-50 accounts you follow and accounts you don’t, and of the accounts you do follow, it prioritizes influencers over friends. Stories are for friends, posts are for influencers, by design. So yesterday, I went through my Instagram and unfollowed most (not all, @littlemanyu_ 4eva) of the influencers I was following. I also learned that you can, in fact, view only posts from accounts you follow: On your home screen, hit the word “Instagram” in the top left, and a dropdown appears. Pick “Following” (or even narrower, you can set a limited number of accounts as “Favorites” and see only them).
I also really don’t want to go back to the zombie-mode auto-scroll. I may block off a certain time on my calendar each week for some intentional social media time. But I won’t soon forget that it is addictive, and it is a time suck, and even if I enjoy it, there is such a thing as too much.
And most importantly: I’m committed to posting like it’s 2009. Because that was when I had fun posting. I will keep taking my bad photos willy nilly and throwing them up, captioned with some stupid quote that someone said after a few glasses of wine.
You should totally join me.
Anna is pooping the biggest poop ever! Muahaha!!!1
Nice! I look forward to seeing your crappy photos, as a certified lurker. Thanks for the tip about "following"! My automatic finger reflex is checking my email, I annoy myself with doing it at all hours!
I have the New Yorker app on my phone and that's my go-to "I'm bored for a few min on the bus" app. But they only have so many stories, and I wait for the magazine to read the ones in print, which keeps it from feeling like a bottomless pit of news. The New Yorker isn't trying to report on everything that happens every day; that pace is too much for me; I prefer the deep dive. I feel informed, but not overwhelmed. And yeah sometimes I learn about something through a face-to-face interaction of "Oh didn't you hear about [event]?" and I'm ok with that. Anyway, just to say, if you're ready for news again I recommend picking one source, possibly weekly instead of daily (maybe the local paper on Sundays?) to keep it manageable. At least, that's how I've found balance!
I loved reading your saga with social media and related to SO MANY of these things. I'm definitely trying to have fun, but for me the biggest thing I struggle with is comparing myself to others which isn't even fair. I want to know how I'm doing and social media does not provide a report card so that's the easiest and least accurate next worst thing. It's so inaccurate especially since social media is a fickle thing and can punish behaviors that were just rewarded the day before. It was nice reading this and being reminded again that I'm not the only one who has a love/hate relationship with this whole thing.
PS I use an app called ScreenZen that has helped me reduce my time on most social media platforms. It makes you wait a set amount of time before you can open it, then lets you only use it for a certain time; it's been surprisingly helpful!
PPS I hope you feel better soon!!!