Posting about the bitten bullet.

11 days out from my most anticipated birthday in memory, I finally let everyone in on the knowledge that I'm tapping out of the social media space from then on.

It was a strange "announcement" to make. The irony of posting it on Instagram and Facebook is not lost on me. I spent the weeks since I created this blog (way back on September 1st) contemplating the way to go. Should I just quietly disappear? Reach out to each friend (both real-life and parasocial) individually? Make a sweeping, catch-all post? Each one felt bizarre in different ways. I genuinely don't want to lose anyone, if at all possible, and I also didn't want anyone to feel like I was holier-than-thou, more enlightened-than-thou, and that everyone should follow my example. Everyone's relationship with social media is their own. No one likes the smug "I'm NoT aCtUaLly On sOcIaLs" asshole. What was the best, most polite, least arrogant way of going about this?

In the end, drama and convenience won out. Somewhat on a whim, I made the catch-all post today.

Then, the most interesting thing happened.

Everyone was super on board.

Replies fell into two camps. It was a relief to find that neither of the camps were "get over yourself, you self indulgent, conceited dickhead". The first camp was: "good for you! It's been great following you, and I wish you all the best!". The second camp is the one I'm finding the most fascinating, populated by people who replied, "oh my god, good for you! That is incredible, I WISH I could do the same! So inspiring!".

So fascinating!! So interesting that we all spend so much time on platforms that we actively, consciously wish we didn't, but clearly feel bound to! The tech bros have done an incredible job of playing on people's sense of loyalty, dedication and investment to instil a literal sense of "can't live without". It is of course somewhat different for those whose livelihoods depend on their online presence in some way; influencers, marketing managers, pop culture experts and the like, but for everyone else, this response has had me mulling all night. Statistically, the majority of social media users are women. Maybe I'm reading far too much into this, and please know I am saying it with utter love, but isn't that response just so female? To feel obligated to continue with something that they know is hurting them in some way, but that they feel emotionally attached to? To put their own wellbeing last, for the convenience of others? Not wanting to upset the apple cart, or go against the grain? So socialised female!

It's also people viewing my own decision as I have presented it: as fully formed and final. As if it's something I came to with ease, without hesitation, and with total certainty, which is of course inaccurate. I did this in long, steady, incremental steps, laboriously outlined below:

• First, I started to investigate how other people did things. I read a few books, watched a few "Digital Detox" YouTube videos and started to sit on the idea, keeping the little egg of wonder warm before letting it hatch into a real idea.
  

• After this, I just tried to spend less time on my phone using only willpower, to predictably poor results. So much of our phone habits are just that: habitual. It's not a conscious decision to be staring into the light box of infinite knowledge, it's just what we do in any and every spare moment.
  

• Eventually I deleted socials from my phone, but still had access to them through my iPad and laptop. I also let myself re-download them any time I was doing anything interesting: going away, on holiday or during our wedding. This behaviour truly is insight into how I felt about socials. It was all about me, and I wanted to make sure I still got to brag about the cool things I did, while hiding the mundane every day. I made sure, however, that once life returned to normal, the apps got deleted again.
  

• But I knew I could still reach social media through Chrome on my phone. The web version of the platforms are clunky and not user friendly, so it naturally cut back my time a little more. Eventually, I also had to set up set up site timers. These would shut the site down after a set amount of time. Over the course of many months, I set it for 30 minutes, then 15, then 10, then 0. I knew that I could just turn the timer off if I really wanted to (and a few times I did), but they were an extra barrier to entry and another chance for me to be conscious about my choices.
  

• I experimented with habit tracking for a month, and kept my total phone use to under an hour a day, for everything. Google Maps, Podcasts, the news, the weather, Googling who that actor is in the thing who was also definitely I think in that other thing. An hour might sound like a lot of time, but it bleeds away so quickly. The limit stopped me from filling time with Wiki rabbit holes and excessive doom-scrolling the news. This helped train me to find non-digital things to fill my time with. It forced me to pick up books, write a little and just stare out the window watching the clouds, willing myself to grow comfortable with boredom. This is the real reality of a life less digitally lived: you gotta be buddies with boredom. It was a very happy month, though; I felt so content, relaxed and centred. This is when the "maybe I should just delete them" idea really took hold.
  

• This lead me to spending time self reflecting and deciding what I was actually scared of, what was holding me back. Once I realised it was the archival nature of social media- the fact that half of my life was safely saved to their servers- I looked into what options I had not to lose it all. As it turns out, you can download your entire Instagram data history. Every single post, caption, inbox, comment, story, every single everything. You send Meta a request for it all, and a few days later they email it to you. It works exactly the same for Facebook. Problem solved, I wasn't going to lose anything after all.

• This meant that I was finally free to release myself, if I was serious about doing so. So I set a deadline for full deletion. I chose my 30th birthday because it felt like a neat little moment, and an unmovable target. It also gave me a full 3 months to gear myself up, make sure I had gotten everyone's phone numbers, set this blog up and mentally prepare. Only after all this, am I ready to actually delete social media. The whole process has taken about 2 years, start to end. It sounds dramatic, but people's shocked and excitedly supportive responses to my decision to leave shows that it is a modern phenomena that people feel deeply. Social media is completely imbedded in our lives and I think that as a population, we are far too flippant about it. "Social media is dumb, it's not real life" we say, except that it increasingly very much is. It is the real world, it's our real lives, and it's our real time. Three hours spent on TikTok really is three hours taken from your real day and your real lifespan.

There seems to be a budding sense of discomfort about this fact; that the internet is only going to get more dominant in our world, when we already feel like it's a bit too much. That we don't know what the top of the mountain looks like but we're exhausting ourselves climbing towards it regardless, that our futures feel decided by huge unfathomable outside forces in Silicon Valley, that capitalism marches on stampeding everything with real value into ashes, that we are the ants beneath its boots, simultaneously drowning and burning in climate related disasters. Fuck yeah, that all genuinely terrifying. Absolutely there is reason for discomfort and pessimism. But do we really need to be plugged into it all the time? All the time? All the time? We have a responsibility to be informed global citizens, yes. We have a responsibility to engage in activism and try to save the world we exploit and rely upon, absolutely. You know what's not helping though? Those three hours on TikTok. You tell yourself that you're keeping up to date, or just taking a mental break, that you gotta be part of every wave of international outpouring of grief or charity or lols. But ultimately, you instinctively know that it's really wasted time. What good is it doing, really? To yourself, to those around you, or to our wet rotating dot of space dust? Your sense of drained doom from spreading your attention across the entire internet inevitably leads to having no energy to participate in anything that could bring joy to our dying planet, or even just your little singular life. What good is it doing?

Alright, I'm getting a little over passionate. I try to be balanced about these things. The internet is a great place. We are living the dream of the Library of Alexander; we have access to all of human knowledge largely for free. It's not all bad, and I wouldn't want to live in a world without it if it meant sacrificing the other advances we've made with its infinite helping hand. But if you are one of the people who saw my post and wished you could make the same decision, I implore you to tap into your sense of existentialism and really recognise that the cliche is true: you only live once. Do you want to do it IRL, or in real life?