One year without social media as a Gen-z 24 year old. I quit social media a year ago and started living my life instead of watching others live theirs. In this video, I tell my story of the top 5 struggles I had with social media, the alarming statistics of social media and mental health, time, comparison, etc and why I left social media. I also go over the highlights of my life since quitting. In each section of the video, I’ll ask you questions to think about to maybe consider a social media detox, a dopamine detox.
Are you watching this video while your room is messy?
OR when’s the last time you saw an influencer on a million dollar vacation and thought ahh my life is perfect as it is? If you feel attacked, I’m in the same boat as you. No shade. I definitely dealt with procrastination, fomo, anxiety, and lower self esteem while I’ve used social media. Most people don’t realize how much social media actually affects them. But at the same time, it’s just a platform, where we choose what to follow and what relationship we have with it.
SO Have you ever thought about why you downloaded instagram or facebook or snapchat to begin with? And why do you continue to open the app everyday? What was your reason? Have you really ever thought about why you have an instagram? If you do have a reason, does your social media feed prove that, reflect that intention? If you go on it right now, are you going to see things that make your mindset better, your relationships better or are you gonna see a bunch of million dollar vacations and edited models that make you feel poor or give you body image issues? Have you ever thought about taking a social media break?
So many people have a story like this, stressed about likes, number of followers, what kind of reaction, and how much praise their posts will get. At the end of the day it’s basing our self worth on external factors. Social media has made this SO common that this group of people are actually referred to as “Generation Validation.” It’s not just wanting to be liked, which is quite normal, it’s needing to be liked and is a psychological concept studied called “contingent self worth.”
A lot of people say that they want to just share their life and it’s not about getting validation from people, which is definitely possible, but if you want to know for sure, ask yourself this: if you post a picture publicly to the world, and you knew that all your friends and family saw it, but it got no likes, zero likes. Zero heart eye emojis in the comments, would you still feel just as happy and satisfied with posting it. If you really are not posting for other people, Would you still post it if it got no likes?
Something else I struggled with was not just how I felt about myself, it about how I felt in comparison to other people.
Social media felt like one big comparison game
Whether it’s looking at the likes on your gym pic v your friends gym pic or watching people have fun at a party you weren’t invited to, or comparing the size of your engagement ring to someone else’s it comes down to comparison. And it’s a losing game because no matter how much you make or what you look like, you can go on a vacation and have so much fun but then you go on social media and you see someone who went on vacation who got proposed to or stayed at a fancier hotel and all of a sudden, what we did, who we are is not enough.
Also, Statistics show that for every selfie we see, around 10 attempts at that selfie have been made — is that you? Have you taken a picture over and over again to the point where it upset you? Have you ever posted a picture of you smiling when you weren’t happy? Or posing in front of a car that wasn’t yours? Or just trying to make your online presence be a better, edited version of reality?
Now — let’s talk about screen time, shall we. I used to spend hours scrolling, I used to stay up and at night lose sleep, my precious sleep to scroll on social media, to watch people who I didn’t even care about. Sometimes I didn’t even want to be on the app, I had so many other things to do like work or cook or clean and I would just find myself not being able to get off. It was such a compulsion. As soon as I got up, like before my brain was even fully awake, my arm would reach out over like a zombie and grab my phone and open the instagram app. And that’s how I started every day. It didn’t feel like I chose to do it, like I intentionally wanted to go on the app before I could even see straight in the morning, it just felt like something I…did. Like I was just programmed to do. It was a social media addiction.
….watch the full video for this plus more 🙂