Quitting Social Media (FINALLY)

In pursuit of more time, peace, and sanity

One day you’re 14 years old, clicking through an 60-picture album full of blurry, slightly chaotic images from a classmate’s latest party and blushing as a Facebook chat from your crush pops up on the bottom right of the screen.

….Then suddenly, you’re 30 years old, endlessly scrolling through shiny AI generated pictures with grotesque alien-looking hands as every other post screams at you that the world is burning, this politician is lying, your ex gaslit you, here’s beach pictures from that random person you met in 2014, your mother is a narcissist, here’s a story of a woman who was sexually assaulted, wait watch this video of someone being violently mugged on the street, good luck because mercury is in retrograde and this $128 pair of jeans will make you happy and here’s the most depressing statistic you’ve ever read in your life with thousands of shares and no source to back it up and you should put these four products on your face before bed every night to avoid wrinkles (because heaven forbid you get wrinkles!) and here’s a pretty drawing and here’s a sad quote and here’s how you can set boundaries and here’s how you can—

Whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa. STOP.

Close the app. Lay back on the bed. Breathe.

Let your mind wander.

Let your mind grow bored.

Reach for the phone. Open up the app.

Repeat.

Repeat.

Repeat.

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It’s true, I realize. I did get social media right as I turned 14, and as I’m now 30, that means I’ve *checks notes* spent more than half of my life on these platforms.

And at the beginning, social media was fun! It was the excitement of messaging my crush late into the night instead of doing homework (and then never making eye contact or speaking during the course of the next school day). It was telling all my friends what book I was reading and how I couldn’t wait for the midnight premiere of the next Harry Potter film. It was tagging my friends in the MacBook Photo Booth pictures we took during German class when we should’ve been working on our project, our face dotted from the comic book filter or stretched out to make our eyes super tiny, morphing our mouths—stretched into wide grins—even wider.

what a time to be alive

Facebook caption reads: “german projects<3 comicc boook!”

Back then, social media was as it set out to be: social.

But now?

Now you’re lucky if you come across any post someone in your actual life wrote.

Instead, you’re inundated with ads, with crises, with bots, with corruption, with *intentional* misinformation¹, with dangerous mob mentality², with echo chambers, with anecdotal stories designed to make you fearful of the world beyond the screen in your hands.

Social media is a shell of its former self, and I don’t believe it’s ever coming back.

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I haven’t been on social media³ since November 5, 2024.

The decision to quit wasn’t supposed to be forever—at least I believed it wouldn’t be so at the time.

Truthfully, rising on the morning of November 6th, after one of the worst sleeps of my life, I was simply…done. A resounding and all-consuming feeling of being done. I had no desire to log onto these platforms that occupied half of my life to see all the election reactionary posts and memes, the blatant disinformation that people who I once believed to be intelligent would share, the short-form, snap analyses that I knew would come out immediately about where the Democratic party went wrong. The finger pointing, the blame game.

Did I really want to consume that? Participate in that?

Instead, I turned to real life people. I met with friends for brunch that morning. I called my mom multiple times that week. I wrote lengthy letters to my friends back in the US. A new American friend who I met here in Germany invited me and another friend over to her apartment for craft night. We ate our weight in charcuterie, moaned about America for too long, and then turned to embroidery for comfort. I found it very therapeutic—all of it. Being in the same space with friends, making something tangible with my hands, laughing and eating and finding a kindred spirit in one another.

i get by with a little help from my friends

A week after the election, I realized I didn’t miss social media at all. So, I continued on without it. Two weeks turned into a month. A month turned into two months.

And here I am, finally free of the digital chains that have controlled me for far too long.

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The truth is that I had been feeling burnt out from social media for a while. The election was simply my breaking point.

In 2023, I read Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention - and How to Think Deeply Again. In 2024, I discovered

Katherine Johnson Martinko

’s The Analog Family, where she writes about digital media and the negative effect that screen-based life has on children as well as parents (as well as just regular ole adults, like me!), and I became an instant fan. Just yesterday, I watched this excellent video Why we can’t focus.⁴

It came to the point when anytime I went online, Bo Burnham’s Welcome to the Internet rattled around my brain: Could I interest you in everything all of the time? Apathy’s a tragedy and boredom is a crime.

When I moved abroad in October 2023, I took a huge step back from social media. I deleted the apps off my phone and only shared occasional updates via the browser versions. I stopped posting Facebook and Instagram stories altogether. Probably a strange move, considering that would be a time when one would wish to feel connected as possible to their social network.

Yet something about posting suddenly felt insincere to me. I no longer wished to broadcast my life to all 1,000 Facebook “friends”—many of whom I hadn’t spoken to or seen since I was a teenager! I longed, instead, to have meaningful conversations and get a chance to be real and authentic about what it means to live abroad (something I also aim to do with this SubStack).

Quite simply, I didn’t want to experience living abroad through the lens of “What would make the coolest post for social media?”

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Here’s the truth that I think many may be surprised to hear:

Quitting social media has made me more social.

Perhaps I need to actually shout this:

QUITTING SOCIAL MEDIA HAS MADE ME MORE SOCIAL!

Almost no one I speak to who is still on social media has much positive to say about it. They all speak about how it’s an addiction, about how they wish they could use it less, about how it taps into the worst side of themselves. But when I gently tell them that I managed to quit, they’re shocked. “I’m not sure I could do that, it’s how I keep in touch with my family and friends!”

I had that fear as well, of course I did. Especially considering I was now 4,100 miles away from said friends and family. Out of sight, out of mind, right?

But here’s the reality of what happened after I quit social media:

I had the obvious yet earth-shattering realization that any relationship worth having takes effort.

I could no longer do the bare minimum by giving a “like” to a friend’s post or sending a little 🔥on their story and pat myself on the back. Good job, Paige, way to support them! You’re a good friend!

This was pseudo-connection. An allusion. Tricking me into believing I was staying in touch, but it was simply the case of ‘quantity over quality.’

Now, I use the extra time and energy gained from being off social media to maintaining actual, real relationships.

I’m now the friend who is going to send you texts out of the blue because I saw something and it reminded me of you. I’m the friend who sends looooooooong emails or hand-written letters. I’m the friend who wants to chill over Zoom or Discord. I’m the friend who is always happy to reply to messages in the group chat. I’m the friend who reaches out to schedule our next in-person hang out. I’m the friend who, when we do hang out in-person, you’ll actually have to catch me up on what’s been going on in your life. The good, the bad, and the ugly, because you bet I’m going to ask follow up questions! I’m the friend who will wish to know everything you’ve been up to, and mean it.⁵

Not going to lie—it feels pretty dang good to be that friend, and even better to meet that “offline” version of my friends too.

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So there we have it. Half my life spent on social media, but no more.

Writing this left a bad self-righteous taste in my mouth, so I do want to be as honest as possible: the decision to leave social media wasn’t (and isn’t) always easy. Before November 2024, there were times when I would re-download the apps “just to see what’s going on,” only to resurface and realize I’d lost hours and hours of my day. An addiction grabbing hold. In a panic, I’d frantically delete them again—my equivalent of cutting up all the cigarettes, dumping the wine down the drain.

I finally got to the point where I shuddered at the thought of the following decades of my life whizzing by in a forgettable collection of memes, AI images, bots, and online fighting—only to find myself suddenly on my death bed, asking, where did it all go?

Aiming for the middle ones!!! (by Mari Andrew)

I often harken back to a gorgeous Mary Oliver poem “The Summer Day” that I (ironically) discovered on social media a while ago, when one line became very popular:

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Well, Mary, since you asked:

I’m going to set down the phone. I’m going to raise my head high. I’m going to gaze at the sky, at the squirrels rustling in the golden leaves, at the laugh lines on the faces of people I love. I’m going to become part of the world again.

1. Called ‘disinformation’ - more here

2. Couldn’t recommend Black Mirror’s Hated in the Nation episode more. I watched it probably 8 years ago and I think about it all. the. time.

3. Everything but SubStack, obviously. Is SubStack social media????

4. I love his optimism around our lack of focus being a solvable problem, and that we have to re-train ourselves how to focus. “You have to give your attention to books. But phones, screens, the internet, videos? They steal your attention.”

5. Not saying that you can’t be this kind of friend with social media, but if you ever quit or take a break from it, you’ll understand that you have to kick it up a notch in order to stay connected to others (and that it is worth it).