Why I Quit Social Media and Can’t Go Back

By Abigail Zajac, 19, Missouri

In November 2021 I made a change. Sitting in my stinky dorm room (because let’s be honest, all dorm rooms smell so bad), I deleted social media apps. Systematically, one by one, I watched the boxes disappear and part of me knew I was never going back.

To be clear on the semantics: deleting an app is not the same thing as quitting cold turkey. Like anything else in life, it is a system. If you delete a social media app, your account is still active. People can still message you and view your profile and the company will still send you emails and messages. They will probably send you more just because you’re not as active.

In order to permanently remove your digital presence, you need to delete or deactivate your account. This is much trickier since these companies do not want to see you go. Keeping you on the app is what keeps them making money. 

I started by just deleting the apps. A freshman in college, alone in a new city, I was using my social media like an emotional pacifier. Any time I felt sad, alone, anxious, or stressed, I would open up an app and start scrolling until I didn’t feel a thing. After starting therapy, I realized that I didn’t want to feel this way anymore, that numbing my senses was not the solution to overstimulation.

I have a hypothesis that I created during the pandemic: the worse my mental health is, the higher my screen time will be. Now, correlation is not causation, so I wanted to do a little experiment. How would I feel if my emotional pacifier was not there? If my screen time went down, would my overall mental wellbeing increase?

Knowing that I was a young person, living on a college campus in a digital age, I figured I would feel lonely and cave after a few days. I didn’t want the decision to be permanent because I felt like I had spent so much time on my accounts. I had invested years into curating feeds, following niche accounts, and making a profile that was unique and sparkling. It seemed brash to undo all of that in one fell swoop just because I was feeling anxious, lonely, and overstimulated.

Even though the apps were gone, my feeds were not. The messages began trickling in after company algorithms saw that I was inactive for the longest period in my entire user history. At first, these emails worked and I logged into the sites via web browser. For a few minutes, I would hungrily devour my feed. Everything seemed so new and interesting now that I was checking my feed once a day instead of every few minutes. Then the pop-ups would hit: “open in the app store to continue viewing” and I noticed the subliminal messaging: get back in the system.

I was left with a distinct feeling that I was going against the grain. I began to grow irritated by these emails. They became a nuisance, pestering me, tempting me to cash in on a few seconds of bliss before feeling frustrated and empty, so I unsubscribed from them. Then, they sent me messages in other ways, including advertisements and notices on different mailing lists. This continued for a good month before I was able to fully remove myself from email lists and stop feeling like a fish swimming upstream. 

After I was gone from the email lists, I stopped wanting to view my feed in browser and then it was like I did not have an account at all. Slowly, ever so slowly, I checked my phone less and less. My screen time decreased hour by hour and oddly enough, I didn’t notice a difference. I didn’t notice a “lack” in my life and I didn’t feel the sense of emptiness that I expected to accompany this change.

If anything, I felt a sense of peace. My head was the quietest it had ever been. I could wake up and go to bed without a series of meaningless audio clips playing on loop. When I had work to do, it got done without hour-long breaks of meaningless scrolling interrupting. Those long term projects and hobbies that I told myself I would eventually get to when I had more time got done. I found myself going to more community events and subscribing to newsletters of things that interested me. I was still using the internet, I was keyed in, but in a whole new way that felt intensely authentic.

In January 2022 I deleted all social media accounts. It was a dramatic affair. A cup of coffee in hand, fully set up at my desk, I scoured the internet for how to delete every kind of account, and it was difficult. Most of them I could do from my computer, but many of them required changing passwords, logging in multiple times, multi-factor identification, and once I even had to re-download my app to complete. Even after all of this, none of my accounts were completely gone. I had to wait 30 to 90 days before my account would be deleted. This made me frustrated because I wanted them gone. I wanted this temptation out of my life. 

I felt like I was not trusted to make my own decisions, so instead, the company was making a decision for me. I thought I knew what I wanted, but yet after I deleted the account that I had had the longest, I felt a sense of immediate regret. All of those memories, all of that time, and all of that history was instantly gone. All those contacts and connections were lost. I would have to start all over again. Then I felt furious at the company for their 30 day policy. I felt like they were preying on my feelings, as if they knew I would feel this way and were urging me to get back in the system as soon and fully as possible.

I realized that I did not want these things back; that I really did not lose anything. All those memories, all those photos were still in my camera roll, and those people, well, the ones who really mattered, I had their phone numbers.

Things stayed much the same for me after that. I continued reaping the benefits of my deletion. I felt my quality of life improve. I have had to create new profiles for work and I find it rather distasteful. The way I use these profiles now is completely different than before; it is professional. I am using a business to grow my business, but I find myself wishing that I could make the constant barrage of emails and notifications go away. 

I know that I do not want it back; that I want my life to be my own, always. I do not want an emotional pacifier, or an algorithm to tell me my interests. I do not want people who I do not know to tell me how I should be feeling or living. I feel content without being bombarded with constant content, and having to redownload accounts has only enforced that realization.

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After my stint on a dating app, I realized that I did not want social media anymore. This realization was powerful for me, so naturally, I wanted to write about my experience. I put my eight-month journey into words as a form of therapy and as a guide to anyone out there who is struggling in this digital age.

Twitter: @AbigailZajac

Photo by Camilo Jiminez