Why I Don’t Use Social Media

One of the biggest things I have done to take agency and control back in my time, my life, and my overall health, was to cut out social media. I’m not talking a reduction, a break, or spending less time on social media. I’m not even talking about setting those iOS time limits on apps to remind myself when I’ve spent too much time in an app. No, cut out as in I decided it was time to delete the majority of my social media accounts, only keep ones that I need to professionally, and even for those ones, don’t have the app on any of my devices, and stop visiting the websites. Effectively, breaking myself out of the routine that many people are set on autopilot for (myself included before I decided to do this).

Now, what about interacting with the public? What about having an online presence and a voice? Well, you’re looking at it. All of my interactions online are right here, on my website, and especially in my Blog sections. This right here is a new branch of my blog that I’ve decided to call “Living Mindfully”. It takes a bit of a different path than my main blog, which is for discussing technology and stories from the Homelab, and focuses moreso on living mindfully and taking agency. Becoming the CEO of your own life, breaking bad habits, building new ones, and using technology as a tool to help you, rather than as devices that trap you and take up your time.

“But a website/blog is kinda one-sided communication”. Exactly, and that’s the point here. One of the traps many people get into with Social Media is that they’ll get into these online debates and arguments about points that don’t even move the needle in their lives, nor the people who are arguing the other side. It becomes exhausting, it’s not beneficial for either party, and studies have shown that social media is engineered largely to present you with an array of emotions. They want your opinions, your reactions, your thoughts, and they don’t care if it creates positive or negative emotions in yourself and in others. In fact, behavioural scientists have identified that negative emotions increase engagement, and as a business, companies who run these social media sites will ALWAYS prioritize their profit margins and their stakeholders over your mental health. And do you think it’s really healthy to constantly expose yourself to content that may be shown to you to invoke negativity, fear, anxiety, or other sub-optimal emotions? How do you think that compounds over time for someone? Sure, it’s not all doom and gloom either, otherwise everyone would stop using social media, so they treat it like a casino slot machine, where it lights up with positive, warm, cozy emotions as well, just for long enough to make you feel that rush of dopamine, before they crash your emotions again with more negative content. In fact, studies have proven time and again that these social media companies literally exploit gambling psychology to drive engagement, which drives ad revenue, which drives sales.

On the topic of “one-sided communication”, this is also not exactly true. I do have a contact email listed in my Contact Me section, where my readers can send messages to discuss topics. I could easily engage in this manner if I want to continue a conversation on a topic with one of my readers.

Think about it, these social media companies are some of the wealthiest tech companies, despite offering “products” that are free to sign-up to, and don’t charge you for the use of that platform, no matter how long you use it. The money has to be coming from somewhere, and if it isn’t you, then you’re no longer the customer. You have become the product.“But how do you stay informed on the news and current events?” you may be asking. Here’s the thing when it comes to media and the news. Just like social media, a lot of news sells fear and negative emotions, and operate on the same type of psychology. Realistically, I have to ask myself “how much does it move the needle in my life if I know there were three more accidents on the highway after I’ve gotten home?”, “how much does it move the needle in my life if I find out there was a stabbing in a city/area that I don’t really visit?”, “how does it move the needle in my life if I find out a building five cities over burned down?”. The answer to all of these questions? It doesn’t, at all. But what it does do is it gets my cortisol up, it invokes a sense of fear, a sense of sadness and compassion for those who were affected (this part isn’t bad, it’s human, but my compassion for the victims on the news doesn’t do anything to help them), and in many cases, it almost gives me a sense of lost faith in humanity, especially when it’s the result of some bad actor’s actions against another person or a group of people. It instills this feeling of “what is this world coming to?”.

That isn’t to say I believe people shouldn’t be informed and that it IS your right and duty as a citizen of the free world to stay informed and educated on current events. So what I do, is I curate my news sources. I find ones that I can trust to be as unbiased as possible, and I focus on areas of the news that actually do move the needle in my life. Tech news, for instance, does directly affect me, as it correlates to both my profession and my personal passions and projects in my Homelab. Key political events and news? I have my sources, and I engage as necessary. I’ve found in many cases, if something super important did actually hit the news, and it WAS something that could affect me and/or something I could/should take action about, there are so many people around me who do watch the news actively, that I will inevitably hear them talking about it very shortly after it aired, and I’ll be able to do my own research into the topic.

One of the biggest revelations I found, was that a lot of “unprecedented” news and seemingly “new and unique” events? Quite a few of those actually have happened in history, as history seems to almost always repeat itself at different times. Reading books allows me to speak to the dead, and even get new perspectives from other great thinkers who are still alive today. It’s my strong belief that you will learn a lot more from reading literature than you ever will from watching the news or clicking news articles on your “feed”.

And while we’re on the topic of a “feed”, do you know who else has a “feed” as a part of their daily life? Farm-raised animals. It’s actually ironic how these social media companies can throw these blatant terms right in front of everyone and yet nobody slows down to actually question why it’s called that. The reason? In the eyes of these social media giants? You ARE their cattle, you ARE one of the “animals” they keep producing product for them in their barn. The “feed” is the thing that keeps you there, keeps you alive, keeps you logged in, keeps you producing.

Now, circling back to my website and blog as my only means of regularly interacting with the World Wide Web, and trading social media for it. One of the biggest motivators here was realizing the benefit in creating over consuming. I realized that I feel better and it feels healthier to create things on the internet, from my soul, and from my thoughts, rather than to just bury my head in someone else’s ideas and consume until my mind fills up, and then discuss someone else’s topics and opinions, and forming my own opinions based on things that I’ve been influenced towards through reading someone else’s work. Writing is a relaxing pass-time for me, and when I cut the communication down to one-sided communication, like with my blog? I feel a sense of satisfaction from creating what I have, getting these topics off my mind and onto the blog, and knowing that these articles are written from opinions and ideas that I have cultivated with experience, and that genuinely reflect how I actually feel and think, without an immediate influence pushing me to formulate an opinion over something.

The other net benefit that I derived from approaching my relationship with the internet this way, is that I can post something, speak my mind, express my opinions, even if they’re not universally agreed upon (opinions never are), and I don’t feel roped in by that feedback system that social media tries so hard to wedge into your psyche. I’m not sitting here biting my nails after publishing an article, counting how many people liked it, craving the dopamine hit of seeing the notifications ping off, or hoping people agree with me in the comments. I simply write it, publish it, and I’m done. The dopamine hit comes from creating something new, publishing content, getting my thoughts out there. But once it’s published? I move on. There’s also no chance of someone flying into the comments section to troll, no bots on this platform, and no getting into messy debates that I frankly didn’t sign up for.

“So what do you do with your phone?”. Now this is the big one. Everyone, from these tech influencers who try to convince people to ditch their smartphones and go with all single-purpose devices, to people who try to convince you that you should throw away all technology and live like a monk, they’re all getting one very critical thing horribly wrong here. And this is something I cannot believe we have lost sight of as a society. The phone does NOT need to be a content consumption machine. It does NOT need to be a social media portal. It does NOT even need to have social media apps. I could write this excerpt into its own article, and perhaps I will, but the smartphone was brought into this world to be a TOOL to make your life better. That fundamentally has not changed. The ONLY thing that HAS changed in our society, is this popular belief that phone = social media. Phone = content consumption. Phone = distraction. This is a lie that’s been fed to all of us by these social media giants. Once I uninstalled social media from my phone and my life? Here’s what I DID start using my smartphone for: a journal to keep track of thoughts, ideas, goals, feelings. A notebook to keep track of to-do lists and other things to keep my life well-organized and to cultivate good habits. A learning portal, that I can stream course content onto, so I can research and learn new skills from anywhere. An audiobook player, so I can passively read books on my commute, or when I’m working on routine tasks, or even when I just want to stretch out, enjoy a creative game like Minecraft, and just build things as I process the contents of the book that I’m reading.

This is the first article for my new series. I hope you enjoyed it, and I hope it opened up a new perspective that a lot of people don’t talk about.