In January, I quit social media. I didn’t close my accounts, but I did delete the apps from my phone and log out of everything online. I didn’t give myself a strict rule saying I couldn’t check occasionally, but I made a concerted effort not to.
Going cold turkey had nothing to do with the new year. Rather, I did it because I realized a few things. Let’s be honest, re-realized.
The first is that social media prompts us to frame our lives through the lens of how others perceive us. No matter how hard you try to escape this trap, I’ve come to believe it’s impossible. Because I worked in media journalism for a long time, I learned to take photographs. I needed them for magazine spreads, behind-the-scenes reels, blog posts. No longer was I allowed to eat before the camera had its fill. No longer could I go on a dive without one. No longer could I share anything without contemplating how it would be received by advertisers, colleagues, or friends.
With advertisers in mind, I had to be careful what I said. With colleagues, I first was told to cultivate an “I want to live that life too” account, then, later under a different boss, told to do the opposite because the travel perks were apparently making people jealous. And then there were my friends who saw this lifestyle posted online and thought I was living the dream. How little they knew. Yes, I traveled extensively, but I never got a break. Every assignment still required writing and photographing, every trip still came with interviews and ideation. I still managed a team, still ensured ten issues shipped a year, still lobbied for a website and a digital asset management platform that frankly should have been in place years before I arrived. I was burned out, depressed, anxious and felt increasingly as though I’d amounted to nothing. This in the face of running the editorial team, of picking up photography, of writing dozens of features, all shortly using my own photographs.
And it bled into everyday life too. I’d find myself mid-hike or mid-meal, mentally framing the shot, writing the caption in my head before I’d even finished experiencing the thing itself. Everything became potential content, not because anyone was asking me to, but because the habit had calcified. That’s the part that unsettled me most.
The second thing I realized is that social media wastes time and invites comparison. The number of times I’ve caught myself mindlessly doom-scrolling these past few years is genuinely horrifying. If I tabulated those hours and funneled them into something I actually care about—reading, writing, exercising—I’m sure I’d have far more to show for it by now.
The other side of this is that social media is largely a landscape of performance. People share the highlights, often dramatized, usually in service of building something—a brand, a business, a persona. There’s an insidious undercurrent to it too, this idea that if you can make others envy your life, you’ve somehow made it. Oh, no one dares say that but it’s there. You need the recognition. I had to fight my way out of this thinking. I’d held a position as a content director at a magazine, and getting to the point where I felt I could leave, and then detaching that job from my ego, was incredibly hard. So hard that when my contract ended, for a good two-weeks I was “bedridden depressed.”
The third reason I got rid of those apps is simple: I’m tired of being sold to. Everyone and their mother has become a salesperson, or a hawker of some product or brand. I know this partly because I’ve frequently been on the other side of it, offered products in exchange for coverage, offered trips in exchange for press. And to be clear, I’m not entirely against that model, it just starts to feel fake when you’re on the receiving side of it. Sometimes the fit is genuine (review a new set of frog kick fins, sign me up). But mostly it isn’t, and the cumulative effect of scrolling through an endless parade of sponsored “authenticity” is exhausting. It makes you feel vaguely used, even when you’re the one doing the scrolling. It makes me dislike the people I’m following, even when they’re the friends I genuinely like in real life.
So I stopped. I don’t know if it’s permanent. I don’t know if I’m missing anything important but increasingly, I suspect I’m not. What I do know is that without it, I’ve had more time to think, more mental quiet, and a lot less to prove. That feels like enough, for now.