It’s been six months since I quit Instagram, five or so years since I left Facebook, over a year since I left Twitter, and I joined and then departed Bluesky so rapidly it doesn’t even count. Tiktok? Absolutely not. I am no longer on social media.
My brain feels like someone took a ball of steel wool to it and scoured away all of the FOMO, envy, jealousy , irritation with clicktivism in the place of political action and constant annoyance that had become a regular part of my days. Duolingo has replaced everything else when a distraction is needed. I’m actually reading those 8,000 word New Yorker stories I always save “for later.” I bought a guitar, and can now play Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” because it only has two chords.
This scorched earth approach is not for everyone. I had to do it for my mental health. Instagram’s images of people laughing, traveling, and enjoying their lives were a constant reminder during breast cancer of how much my formerly expansive life shrank during and after treatment. The bullying and shouting and bots on Twitter had long ago lost any appeal, but Bluesky was so full of preening and posturing about its superiority, the bizarre fact that people with big followings on that app will not follow you back even if you’ve interacted IRL, people constantly talking about how Bluesky is not like other apps (it’s exactly like other apps)... no thank you. Bluesky is Twitter for liberal snobs. And I’m not touching the time suck that is TikTok with a fifty foot pole.
But it’s hard not to be sanctimonious about this. When I tell people I quit social media, they usually say “good for you! But I just can’t do that because…” And when I say yes, you really can do it, I have to bite my tongue. Those of us who don’t use social media are not, in fact, better or smarter than people who do. We are not superior. We’ve just decided that it doesn’t work for us, and in my case, it was because I was using it to hurt myself.
My worst, most shameful online habit is spending time looking at the social media accounts of writers who are much more successful, thinner, wealthier, more job secure or better looking than I am, and using that as an excuse to beat up on myself. Why does this person’s Substack have ten times my following, why does this writer on Instagram who I know for a fact doesn’t have a day job have the money to travel around the world, why does this writer on Twitter who once called me a narcissist have a masthead job at the magazine I used to work for? I just kept clicking, and clicking, and clicking, and I did it for hours and hours at a time. It’s probably a symptom of depression, but I had to cut the cord to stop.
A couple of years ago, a writer I knew posted on Instagram about her “weight loss journey,” including spon con about Orange Theory Fitness and some diet app. She was big on selfies, a beautiful woman with a lovely body before the weight loss, but the tone was “my life is so much better now than I’m thin.” I went hiking later that morning, mulling about how my corpulent body is disgusting, repulsive, grotesque, everything fueled by her message that having the free time to hit the gym every day made her somehow superior to fatties like me.
And then I looked down, and my foot was about six inches from stepping onto a rattlesnake. It was coiled on the trail, the same color as the California soil, and I was so deep into that spiral of self hatred brought on by a typical Instagram post that I did not even see it. I breathed deeply and stepped carefully around the snake.
But I didn’t stop using social media, mostly because I had a forthcoming book and was told I needed a “platform” to promote it. Social media was always there, the rattlesnake waiting to strike and bring on the poison of self hatred. Getting cancer made everything worse, seeing every account where a pink warrior filmed herself dancing during chemo or earned a thousand “you’re so brave” comments and hearts for taking selfies during radiation. More excuses to hate myself when I looked like Gollum and felt like hell. The excruciatingly slow process of recovery has not made this any better.
I am in my fifties and have had years of therapy and still felt this way. Imagine feeling these things as a young adult, teenager, child. That is what the CEOs of these companies want. They want us to hate ourselves so that we spend more time on money on these apps. Hate your body? Here’s a body positivity influencer schilling cheap synthetic clothes. Hate your mind? How about this wellness app, this YouTuber preaching self acceptance, this other app, this other platform, this army of people promising to heal your shattered self esteem.
So it wasn’t one thing that drove me away. There were thousands of tiny, stabbing wounds every day. And you have to cauterize wounds to staunch the bleeding.
A Medieval “wound man”, via Open Culture.