Everybody talks about why social media is bad for you (places like here and here, more specifically). But stats and admonitions have never motivated me. It took a personal epiphany following a particularly soul-sucking doom-scrolling session to make me want to make a change.
I had to get to a pretty dark place before I could really see and feel the negative impacts of my social media use. My girlfriend had broken up with me, I had a lot of uncertainty at work, and the finances weren’t looking pretty. Everything I’d found worth in up to that point had been stripped away (God knew what he was doing, but that’s another story) and I’d run to Instagram reels or YouTube videos to distract myself, avoiding the anger, frustration, loss, and grief bubbling up inside. Watching the highlight reels of my friends’ lives (or my ex-girlfriends’ lives) didn’t help, either.
But in a sudden moment of mental clarity following that specific hours-long doom-scrolling bout, I realized just how much precious time I’d wasted and how numb I felt. My life was devoid of color. What happened to my hobbies? Real friendships? I had sobered up, if only for a minute, and I knew I needed to capitalize. So I took control of one of the few things I actually had power over at that time of my life and deleted all my social media.
One Way Out
And I mean DELETED. My Instagram (the biggest offender), yeah: completely erased from the internet. It took me 45 minutes to figure out how because the folks behind that app really don’t want you to leave. They were so desperate to keep me it had me questioning if I’d ever been truly wanted or loved before. I deactivated my Facebook and deleted Snapchat from my phone. Twitter (it wasn’t X yet) was already a cesspool by that point, so that one was easy to get rid of. As for YouTube, I deemed it useful enough to stay, but every time I clicked on a short, I made myself do ten pushups (I did get stronger, but that app really needs to add a “remove shorts” feature).
Knowing myself, I had to take extreme measures, or I would’ve gone right back.
It only took about 20 minutes of me being alone with my own thoughts before the anxiety kicked in. Being in my own head wasn’t comfortable. The easy escape was gone. But slowly, over time, things started to shift. Every time I chose to simply exist in moments of free time or downtime in my day—waiting in line at Chipotle, driving to the grocery store, washing the dishes, or folding my laundry (confession: I don’t actually fold my laundry, but you get the idea)—the twitch to pick up my phone got a little less powerful.
My digital world had me in a tighter grip than I’d ever imagined, but I was finally loosening its hold. All it took was an active, intentional decision every day to be present.
Life on the Other Side
Post social media break-up, I actually started to introspect again. My creativity started to return more consistently. When I gave myself the time to think things through, I was suddenly more at peace with myself and more aware of the world around me. The world started to get colorful again.
I’m not alone, or even the first to make note of what this breathing room does. Neil Gaiman, one of the best authors of our time (if you’ve watched American Gods, Good Omens, or The Sandman, those are all adaptations of his work), once said: “Ideas come from daydreaming. They come from drifting. So if you want to get a good idea for a book, you have to let yourself get so bored that your mind has nothing better to do than tell itself a story.”1 Scientists have shown that boredom actually activates the part of the brain responsible for empathy, introspection, and creativity.2
Without even realizing it, I’d been robbing myself of all three. I’d distracted myself into becoming a shell of myself. By deleting my social media and removing my ability to run away from my thoughts and feelings, I started to come back to life.
But the relational transformation shocked me even more. I started to understand how shallow and relatively meaningless my social media “friendships” were. So many of those people were people I’d never see in person again—past acquaintances from a past life. Their approval, their opinions, their thoughts, and the events in their lives had no tangible bearing or impact on mine. It also turned out that not knowing the latest drama surrounding Henry Cavill and his time on The Witcher didn’t lead to a mental collapse.
What I did suddenly have was time, attention, and bandwidth for the people in my immediate circle. And my abrupt exodus served as a great filter to determine which people actually cared about me and who had just become a fleeting image in my social media feed. I’m starting to believe humans weren’t designed with the means to maintain hundreds or thousands of social and para-social relationships.
Anthropologist and psychologist Robin Dunbar argues humans have the social capacity to maintain only up to 150 casual friendships, and while social media allows people to try and stretch that limit, “the social capital you have is pretty fixed. It involves time investment. If you garner connections with more people, you end up distributing your fixed amount of social capital more thinly so the average capital per person is lower.”3 In other words, the more social connections you maintain, the shallower they become. Every like, every comment, every minute spent watching someone else’s life depletes your social capital. I was living that reality, and it took a drastic break-up to turn my relationships around.
The Low Whisper
After the Old Testament prophet Elijah calls down fire from heaven in front of the entire nation of Israel—a spiritual mountaintop—he hits one of his lowest spiritual valleys. He’s on the run from the wicked queen Jezebel, who’s vowed to take his head. Devoid of hope and hiding in the wilderness, God prompts him to stand outside, where suddenly winds powerful enough to tear down mountains sweep the land, tremors break the earth beneath his feet, and flames roar around him. But God is not present in any of these phenomena. He instead speaks to Elijah in a low whisper.4 So often, in the midst of the storms and earthquakes and fires of our lives, God is speaking to us softly, and if we’re not attuned to his voice, to his cadence, we’ll miss it.
I was in a low place, and the numbing, loud, social media-fueled distractions I was using to cope had completely drowned out the voice of God. I couldn’t hear myself think, let alone Him. But once the distractions were gone, I could hear Him again. Faintly at first, and then more and more clearly the more I practiced listening for Him. I accepted His encouragement, noticed His protection, received His direction, and basked in His love.
The ability to experience and access Him more fully was the greatest result of my social media breakup.
A Wholesale Change
After about a month, I stopped missing the distraction my social media provided. I’d escaped the “increase[d] sorrow” that comes with increased knowledge.5 That’s not to say that because my social media was gone, all temptation to numb myself went with it–plenty of other distractions called out to me. I had to be careful to not just substitute one distraction with another. TV, alcohol, pornography, and a host of others all called out, wanting to take me right back to that numbed-out avoidant place. I had to continually make the active, intentional choice to walk past comfortable side streets and venture down the hard road straight through the pain I was feeling in order to discover the full, rich, and colorful life God had for me.
It’s not about which distraction you choose but whether you’re living distracted (and if you’re alive in today’s world, I’ll bet, like me, you sometimes are). Things are still hard, but I believe now I’m actually living the hard rather than hiding from it, and that in and of itself is fulfilling.
Now, two years later, tuning into a social media feed doesn’t even cross my mind, and I’m the better for it; I haven’t missed out on anything that matters, and I’ve been so much more present and engaged with the people and things that give me life. And most importantly, I’ve been able to truly abide in the love of God.6
But don’t take my word for it; break up with your own social media and see what happens-unlike Rachel and Ross, you might end up realizing you were better off apart.
1Vox, “Neil Gaiman: boredom is a writer’s best friend,” Constance Grady, 2016.
2Psychology Today, “Unplug, Get Bored, Create,” Manoush Zomorodi, 2017; Journal of Experimental Psychology, “Approaching novel thoughts: Understanding why elation and boredom promote associative thought more than distress and relaxation,” Volume 52, May 2014, Pages 50-57.
3The New Yorker, “The Limits of Friendship,” 2014. Also see: BBC, “Dunbar’s number: Why we can only maintain 150 relationships,” 2019.
41 Kings 19:12. For more on Elijah and his story, read 1 Kings 17-19.
5Ecclesiastes 1:18b.
6John 15:9.
Disclaimer: This article is 100% human-generated.
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