I hate social media and have tried to quit many times.
It’s a cycle of realizing I’m using the apps too much, getting annoyed & removing them from my phone, adding them back temporarily for some specific task… aaaaaaaaaand repeat.
Stupid.
So I just deleted all of my accounts. Facebook, Instagram, Threads, TikTok, Twitter, all gone. And all the pages associated with them.
Again.
Why?
1 – I’m getting old. My energy is limited. Social media wastes time I could spend on things I value: riding my bike, reading books, and being creative.
2 – It trains my brain to expect novelty and stimulation — making it difficult to enjoy slower, simpler, important-er things.
3 – It’s disposable information. I’ll never remember any of it, even an hour later. I’d rather invest in activities that have a lasting impact on my life.
4 – It dilutes my friendships and relationships, replacing meaningful communication with low-effort activities. Forwarding reels and memes is fun, but it has the effect of replacing personal contact. Social media is a failed proxy, not a substitute for in-person visits or phone calls. If we’re friends, invite me over or call me. If you don’t have my number, email me: carl@carlkingdom.com.
5 – These companies know how bad and addictive their products are for us, and want to keep us scrolling and pulling the lever on their slot-machine-like apps for as many hours a day as possible. (They even want to strap them to our faces. How insane is that?) Social media only exists to make billions of dollars selling our attention to advertisers and training their AIs with our data.
6 – I don’t care about current events, and I don’t believe being angry and complaining to bots on social media is “staying informed.” It’s political hobbyism.*
7 – For those who post a lot of free “content” for social media sites to profit from, it’s a behavior modification loop. We try to outsmart and please the robot so it won’t downrank our posts by default. It increases our cravings for attention through intermittent validation, like mice pressing a lever for cocaine.
8 – Very few people earn money from posting on social media. Because of survivorship bias (and because those outliers are boosted in the feed), we assume it’s a normal, achievable thing. For most, it’s a treadmill of frantic activity, hoping to someday earn $100 for hundreds of hours of work. Too speculative for me.
9 – There is an assumption that I need to be on these platforms. But I don’t. Social media can have positive uses, but for me, it’s a net negative. My goals can be accomplished in ways that already exist outside of the algorithmic feed. I was better off without it.
All of this has been said before.
Stop scrolling. Read a book:
Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport
Ten Arguments For Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier
Amusing Ourselves To Death by Neil Postman
*“For most people who are political junkies, their news consumption is not really geared toward information that is going to help them be active citizens in the community. And even if it is, they’re not being active in the community. Most people who are daily news consumers belong to zero organizations and have worked zero times in the past year with other people on a community problem. So, most people are not doing anything.” –Eitan Hirsh on The Ezra Klein Show, March 11, 2020