Although 2018 hosted multiple significant milestones in my life including getting engaged and moving from FL to VA, none were as polemic as my decision to retreat from the social media scene indefinitely.
I have to admit, my bold move did come at a rather interesting time in my personal life considering the eventful timeline in which it fell. Many would argue that this increased activity is prime SM time (proposal, engagement party, an out-of-state relocation, adapting and settling into a new city and state…) as it beckons opportunities for multiple announcements and updates. But actually my “disappearing act” went into effect at the very beginning of the year (literally January 1st) and so by the time I got engaged two months later in March and shortly after moved to Virginia in April, I had had some time to really look my decision in the eye, so to speak, and feel the full effects of it. I believe most platforms mandate that some time pass before completely deleting all of your data, just in case that FOMO gets the best of you and you decide to come back. I could have turned that car around had I wanted to, and hopped back on the SM train and salvaged my entire digital account of the majority of my adult memories, achievements, noteworthy events, while augmenting my collection with an engagement post here, a bye-bye FL post there…
But I didn’t budge! I honestly didn’t even consider going back on my word. Even when it came time to help my friend plan a Going Away party for my partner and me and it became pretty apparent that using Facebook was definitely the easiest and most practical solution, I worked around it. By then I was determined to move forward with my life sans SM. In fact, both my partner where on the same page and while we had both been complaining about SM for quite some time, actually going through with the deactivation process (as opposed to abandoning our accounts like the usual non-user MO) was something in which we both partook after discussing our confirmation of our decision to continue to abort. To be quite honest, it felt like it may have been a bit more difficult for me to pull the plug simply because I had dedicated myself to documenting my highlight reel ever since Facebook became a thing back in the early 2000′s when I was in college. I was one of the early club members, and had all sorts of data that went pretty far back I’d say. In fact, at one point I would say in 2009, my Facebook account split like a fork in the road would- metaphorically speaking- and resulted in two different accounts, an Arab account for family and friends of family and an American one for -you know- my second life.
Anywho, I was tired of it all. Tired of the overzealous pondering of how to encapsulate the perfect moment at the perfect time while doing the perfect activity–and don’t forget the perfect hashtags! All the while looking perfect. It felt like a second job. It wasn’t so much that I was concerned with others’ reels- although I did have the few whose accounts I obsessively stalked for the latest trends- as much as I was obsessed with reflecting the most perfect image of myself in my own head thus reflected onto my social media identity/image. My epiphany began once I started becoming more conscious of my efforts to convince others, or more pointedly MYSELF, of my perfect life…and suddenly I just felt this urge to stop because I was really critically questioning my end game! For a long while there before we actually deleted/deactivated the accounts, my partner and I would toy with the idea of deleting them and going cold turkey but would claim the other never do it and then one day we decided to call our own bluffs and pulled the plug together, and have not looked back since.
But my other loved ones? That’s another story. It has now been a year since our virtual retreat and I personally still have to hear the countless urges of my close friends and family to make a comeback. Never mind the fire hose of studies that prove that social media negatively affects our self-esteem, narrows our perspective, and devotedly summons our evolutionary trait of relentless social gauging and comparison. No, these glaring yet easily-overlooked points do not stop my social circles from wondering aloud things like, “Sooo, how do you keep in touch with everyone?” I graciously remind them that we still have very “smart phones” that text and send multimedia messages on their own, without any supplemental use from platforms such as Snapchat, Messenger, and the like…and yet, somehow, they still seem confused…
As hard as it may be for you to believe this, I have no desire to come back to the social media world. I attribute this lack of desire to being able to break through to the other side and am now authentically happier, which is what I sought out to do by taking this modern-day plunge into social suicide. Gone are the days I am consumed with selecting the most envy-baiting picture and caption to describe my life events and happenings; instead, I JUST LIVE THEM. No posting, boasting, displaying, or unnecessary sharing of our everyday lives. I mean who ever scrolls back to read those old posts anyway? We still try to remember to take pictures here and there but it is admittedly becoming increasingly difficult as it is no longer on the forefront of our minds. And when we do capture beautiful or funny images, we choose to and with whom we share these and it makes for a more intimate exchange with increased likelihood of comments/reactions rather than the now-conventional and robotic posting followed by waiting for the likes, loves, etc.
I know many people feel that they have invested too many memories, words, pictures, time, and energy into their social identities just to have it all vanish. But I eventually reached a point where I had to ask myself if it was really serving my soul any purpose to maintain all of that. And what I have seen from my year of social media sobriety is that my carefully-constructed and curated social identity was constantly enabling a relentless fixation with the most vain and superficial parts of myself and this cast light on my own insecurities. I began to feel like it was all phony: not only the stuff I put out there but what I was consuming by others as well. The truth is who I came to be and what I came to be has something to do with my life’s presentable- or postable-moments but were predominantly influenced by the challenges, adversities, the grit, the mistakes made and lessons learned which are rarely if ever glorified on our online accounts (like -say- our new shoes are).
Call me extreme, call me crazy…but I finally did the unthinkable and said no to social media and yes to life.
And with that, I will leave you with the following quote from this article posted by The Atlantic’s Hannah Seligson from a few years ago:
“On social media, we all want to be seen as ducks, a term researchers at Stanford University came up with to convey how, like the animal, young women want to be seen as gliding serenely along, but in fact under the surface are paddling ferociously.” https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2015/09/luckygirl-hashtag-instagram/406420/