Introduction
I used to love social media as it was a way to keep up with friends, keep up with the world, and was a creative outlet for myself. Being able to connect with anyone across the planet still sounds as magical as it did when the internet came out. As time went on, I felt social media was hurting me more than helping me so I have gone on a cleansing regiment. In 1981 nearly half of smokers knew cigarettes were bad for you but people could not quit [1]. I believe social media is currently at that stage since nearly half of Gen Z wishes social media was never invented [2]. As a member of Gen Z myself, I wrote this piece to help my fellow generation mates quit. I will go the problem with social media, and how I was able to quit.
The incentive structure for these platforms is not to get you to create, or to feel good, or to be educational. Their only incentive is to get you to see and click on as many ads as possible, which requires them to keep you on their platform as long as possible. This means these platforms have become insanely addicting. I’m defining an addiction as an activity that you want to stop doing but you can’t. Even after being sober from instagram and twitter for months, I still feel the urge sometimes to open said sites, which is a testament to how addicting they are.
Due to the need to ensure these platforms are addicting, they have all relegated to showing you the most common denominator content in the shortest format possible. Most things that matter in life require deep thinking an analysis. As Bo Burnham said, all you get on social media is “a little bit of everything all of the time” [3]. This lack of depth does not lead to retention of the content, deep thinking about the content, nor breakthroughs. A tiktok short could be trying to convey the same information as a blog, but I can guarantee you the blog will be easier to retain simply due to it requiring more brain power to read. As Daniel T. Willingham says in “Why Don’t Students Like School?”, people only find it easy to look at things already on top of their mind, which social media exploits [4]. For true learning, you need to see something at least slightly different from what is on top of your mind. You need to actually think about the content not mindlessly look at it. I say all of this to explain how these platforms are not even good for learning.
How To Quit
FOMO
I first have to go through the fear of missing out, as that is the main reason I hear from my friends as to why they don’t quit. The algorithm feeding exactly what you want to see, so what is on top of your brain, at any given time. So you have to recognize the algorithm is insanely correlated to you so you’re not missing out on general culture or news or anything. That means you will be missing nothing from those categories by deleting the apps, so there is no need to fear missing out on anything. This means your real goal should be to minimize the algorithm as much as possible so you both don’t feel fomo while not being glued to your phone. If something is important, people will tell you about it in real life or message you it.
Beeper
I still love to message my friends, no matter their preferred platform, so I have been using beeper which consolidates all my messaging needs. This is especially useful for any messages I get on instagram because the base app has shorts that I can not remove. So to delete instagram without feeling like I’m missing out on all the chats, I use beeper. I’m not sponsored by them and this is not an ad for beeper, but it’s the best one I have found for the messaging purpose.
Remove Shorts
They are many apps that have added short form content like YouTube or even Twitch. I run YouTube revanced not even for the Adblock but just to remove shorts. I don’t want to pirate and would even pay for YouTube premium to have said option, but currently YouTube revanced seems like the only option to allow me to do that. I have made an exception for long form YouTube content as I personally feel I retain enough of it to not make it a complete waste of time, and I don’t find it as addictive. I might feel differently about this one day and turn off the algorithm completely on YouTube, but I have not done so yet.
There are instagram apps that allow you to go on instagram without reels as well but I personally don’t feel comfortable sharing my Instagram account with a non verified third parties outside beeper, as I have been hacked once, so do so at your own risk. I personally find missing out on some friend’s pictures and stories an acceptable compromise for my sanity, as long as I still get the messages from beeper. I can keep up with my friends through Locket and BeReal as well, as those apps don’t have short form content.
News and Information
News and information is still great and tbh I am struggling to find a proper replacement. Hackernews is great for keeping up and so are certain subreddits and twitter, but having Reddit or twitter on my phone leads to pointless scrolling, due to their algorithms being really aggressive. Morning Brew was a good option for a while but I could not justify the price without twitter support. Currently I’m on brutalist.report but I’m keeping my eyes out for something more customizable. (Maybe I’ll work on it myself ;)) There are also youtube channels like TLDR news and The Friday Checkout can help you stay on top of things.
Finding new information for research I still find the best choice is to simply use google. It will show results from all the social medias and other sources as needed. but make sure you only access them intentionally for research not to mindlessly scroll. I also sometimes use perplexity, which provides information as an LLM with sources as a starting point.
Creative Outlet
Practically all the social media apps have creator apps that can be used without using the social media itself. Capcut is great for short form content and tiktok, meta, and YouTube have tiktok studio, meta business suite, and YouTube studio respectively. For Twitch there’s streamlabs. For text based one, for twitter there’s typefully, and for Reddit I’ve opted to just using my note taking app obsidian, and posting things on my personal blog (which you are reading right now :))
The tiktok studio app even shows generally trending reels if you want inspiration. You will also just see inspiration from watching any other forms. Many times youtubers will show tiktoks on screen so you can get a gist of what’s going on. Not wasting time on social media will just simply boost your creative output. As opposed to silencing you thoughts with mindless scrolling, you can start writing them out and creating content around it!
Conclusion
After a month of no social media, I find myself having more time and feeling much better about nearly everything. I have better and more fulfilling relationships, feel more productive at work, and have seen the most improvement in my hobbies! I would recommend anybody else who wants to go on this journey to go on it. It will be rough for the first few weeks but I promise it will be worth it if you stick with it.
Sources
[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5810659/
[2]: https://theharrispoll.com/briefs/gen-z-social-media-smart-phones/
[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1BneeJTDcU
[4]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4959061-why-don-t-students-like-school/