Deleting Social Media

Ever since watching the Netflix documentary “Social Dilemma”, I’ve been trying to distance myself from social media. But being in the total grasps of Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat, I knew it was going to be a long and hard journey. One of the biggest challenges to get over was the fact that every single person has social media. Whether it is the stranger sitting next to you in class, your closest friends, or your mom that sends you articles that aren’t backed by science, you are the odd one out for not having social media. I realized that I had a social media addiction when I had schoolwork piling and piling up on me.

My attention span was diminishing to the point where I couldn’t focus on doing work for more than 15 minutes at a time. Every 15 minutes I gave myself a “break” from work and whip out my phone to scroll Instagram endlessly. The next thing I know, 20 minutes have passed. I started with setting time restrictions on social media apps. But that didn’t work well when I just ignored the popup. I thought placing them in folders would make me open them less since, you know, it is one more step to take to get to them.

When the iPhone update with the library app section came out, I deleted the apps from my home page. I thought for sure this was going to curb my addiction but it didn’t it was a constant cycle that always ended with me coming back.

The way social media is designed now is to keep users engaged. Endless homepage, story features, likes, notifications, even the 5-second ads on youtube are made to catch your attention in those 5 seconds. When I had TikTok for a month, I realized how bad an app can be because I can EASILY spend a few hours on TikTok and not even notice it. I had a dependency on social media and it took me a while to accept that.

One day I deleted them off my phone because I didn’t want to be reliant on something that makes me anxious. It has been 2 months being social media-free, and it’s been nice. I have a lot more time to do things that I always wanted to do but never started. Like reading, going on walks, and actually being productive.

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