Life Disconnected From Social Media

I don’t want to waste your time if you clicked on this post, so if haven’t talked in a while and you want to reconnect, please fill out the form below! You can submit your phone number, Discord ID, or both. Whatever you feel most comfortable sharing. Otherwise, feel free to scroll past the form to read the rest of the post!

Background

I feel like I have an interesting perspective on social media compared to most other people, seeing that I grew up homeschooled, didn’t get my first smartphone until I was about 13, and didn’t have access to most of the internet until I was 16. Many of my friends did not (many still don’t) stay in touch with conventional communication methods (like texting or calling), creating difficulties when trying to stay in touch when you’re one of their only friends who don’t have social media.

As you could imagine, once I got access to social media, it opened up a whole new world of opportunity to stay in touch with friends for longer than before! It felt like I could stay in touch and keep up with people as if we were all in the same room together. When the times were going good, it was one of the best feelings to have, but unfortunately, the digital world doesn’t promote relational and emotional stability. I would quickly learn that lesson the hard way in 2020 with a moment in time I wish I could forget.

The Fallout (2020)

It’s been said a million times, but 2020 was a difficult time for most people. While many of us have a similar experience to one another, there are still a variety of reasons for why each of us struggled (or didn’t struggle) that won’t always see the light of day. As a personal example, school wasn’t much of an issue since I grew up homeshooled; rather, it was my social life that ended up ruining my mental health.

From 2018-2020, I had an amazing friend group that I met through a youth organization called the Presbyterian Youth Connection Council (PYCC). I joined the group back in 2017 as a quiet, shy kid that just wanted to meet new people and make some friends. As I spent more time talking with my peers in this group, I started to feel comfortable leaving my shell and speaking up whenever I had an idea or something that could help others. This was in large part thanks to the loving, supporting environment that surrounded the group, as it allowed me to fail without feeling shame or guilt from external sources. Looking back on those years, they were some of the best years of my teenage life and I always look back on those moments with extreme fondness.

Many of the friends I made in PYCC used social media to communicate and stay in-touch with each other. Being someone who never used social media before then, I decided to sign up to a variety of social media platforms, primarily Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter. Instagram was mainly to see other’s posts and post memes I made, Snapchat was primarily for messaging people and getting fast responses, and Twitter was primarily for content creators I liked and wanted to keep up with.

During the lockdown, many of my friends from PYCC stayed in touch via a Snapchat group chat and Zoom for playing games and/or chatting verbally with each other. It was a fun way to spend an otherwise boring time at home and still feel like we never stopped hanging out. Things went well overall from my perspective until the beginning of June with the death of George Floyd. The group became politically divided within a matter of hours, if not minutes. As I was watching the conversations in the group chat unfold, I watched people leaving the group chat one-by-one, never to return. In that moment, I felt as if I had lost one of the most integral friend groups I ever had, and in conjunction with another relationship issue I was having outside that friend group, it sent me into a downward spiral mentally.

Looking back on that event, I never really attributed this event to social media. But had we not been in contact with each other for so long post-lockdown, the likelihood of that happening would’ve been much smaller. Social media wasn’t the core problem, but rather an enabler of issues like the one my friend group had. It can unite really easily, but it can divide just as easily. I still used social media to stay in touch with the other friends I hadn’t lost touch with since I still saw some good in using social media.

Pulling the Plug (2023)

Post-2020, I started to feel a bit better, but I always knew in the back of my head that I’d never be able to go back to that pre-2020 feeling. I’d end up spending the next 2-3 years just chugging along, not really doing a whole lot outside of part-time work and going to community college. Around May 2022, I’d end up leaving my part-time job at my home church to go work at a place called Mo Ranch where I got to explore a new work environment and meet new people. It was an opportunity to get out of my funk and get a good change of pace that I hadn’t had in a while.

After Mo Ranch, I’d end up finishing up with community college with my sights set on transferring to UT Dallas in Fall 2023. Before that time though, I applied and got the offer to work at Montreat Conference Center as a part of their summer Production Crew. I had never been to Montreat before that summer, but I had the opportunity to go when I was younger and missed it. I told myself that I wouldn’t dare miss another opportunity after last time. My hopes were sky-high after my experience at Mo Ranch, due to them both being associated with the presbyterian church (PCUSA), but to say that this was a rough summer would be an understatement.

Don’t get me wrong, the weather was a safe haven compared to the Houston heat, and the mountains were nothing like I’d ever seen before, but my mental health would take yet another hit and I would end up spiraling multiple times within the span of a month. I enjoyed the work itself, being one of the most experienced people there, but the people I worked with created a culture of cliques and after-parties that I could not vibe with. I felt like I was an outsider both due to my sober nature and my lack of experience at Montreat before that job. I would have multiple mental breakdowns and go to bed crying, it was that bad.

During one of my mental breakdowns, I was scrolling through Instagram and Snapchat. The more I scrolled, the worse I felt. Seeing all these pictures of people going on summer vacations, smiling for the pictures to show they were having a good time, it made me feel like I had picked the worst way to spend my summer. In that moment, I decided to delete Instagram off my phone and completely delete my Snapchat account, as my communications on Snapchat devolved into streaks for the sake of making number go up, cause bigger number better.

My Current Status and Stance on Social Media

After that summer, I would end up having a rough first semester at UT Dallas, with grades that started out as A’s falling down to B’s and C’s. I knew I had to make a change more than just getting rid of social media after my mental health wasn’t improving like I hoped it would. I would take the initiative towards fixing my mental health and visit one of my campus councilors over Microsoft Teams to start the process. That call would lead me to going to group therapy during the spring 2024 semester, where I got to hear other people’s stories and I could share my own with multiple people rather than only having one person to bounce off of. It gave me yet another avenue to bond with people while exercising my capabilities for empathizing and would be what led me to feeling better than I had in years.

Since then, my grades started to go up, I hit the final nail in the coffin of deleting Twitter (which would have been X by then) with the craziness of the 2024 elections, and I’ve been prioritizing the friends I still see and talk to more regularly. Most of my communication comes in the form of Discord messaging, text messaging, or phone calls. I still occasionally check some of the social media accounts I still have open, but for the most part, I start scrolling and realize why I left in the first place. I also still see posts that people share since it’s basically impossible to completely avoid social media, but I feel like I can have a discussion with people away from the social media banner rather than a pointless internet argument.

I’ve been a lot happier since I started prioritizing my mental health and the people closest to me. Spending less time scrolling through social media has made me realize just how much of a time sink it is and how respect can be hard to come by on those platforms. While I believe social media is not inherently bad, with the way most platforms work, they either become an echo chamber due to the algorithm trying to find content that you’ll click on, or it only shows parts of people’s stories with too much room for interpretation and assumptions.

Even on top of my personal experience with social media, the amount of data tracking that companies like Meta perform to make you the product rather than the customer is completely antithetical to my morals ^{1 2 3 4}. The amount of exploitation that comes out of these platforms makes me sad to see an idea get turned from the concept of staying in touch or meeting people via telecommunications to how to profit off of people clicking on and engaging with posts for advertisers to make money. It’s especially difficult when the people I want to stay in touch with the most won’t respond via text as fast as they would if I messaged them on Instagram or Snapchat.

Conclusion

With all my ranting and story telling to the side, I felt motivated to write this post as an invitation to those I’ve lost touch with that want to reconnect the opportunity to do so. If you still have any semblance of care for wanting to reconnect with me, please fill out the form above. I would love to say hi, catch up on life, and learn about both the good and bad parts of your story (even the parts of your story that you don’t think matte). I really love the feeling of reconnecting with people after a long time of no connection, because often times, it feels like we never skip a beat when we start talking again!

Thank you to those who’ve read this far down my ramblings. It means more than words can describe that you take time out of your day to decipher my words and understand where I come from. I hope we reconnect if we don’t already talk. Either way, take care of yourselves.