On Logging Off

I had a reminder in my phone on February 23rd to notify me that February 26th was coming up in a few days, and that on February 26th, my Instagram account would be deleted. After a year of having my account deactivated, I decided to pull the plug entirely in January, but when you activate the cancellation mechanism on Instagram (after multiple encouragements to just “deactivate” so you can take a break) you are informed that your account is “deleted” but you have a month to reverse course if you have a change of heart. I assume their hope is that once you’ve willed yourself into hitting the delete button, you’ll second guess yourself over the next 30 days. Maybe you’ll wake up in a cold sweat in the middle of the night, scramble for your phone, and log back on.

I’ve slowly weaned myself off of social media for a while now, and I try to be careful in how I talk about that process. The shorthand for a sanctimonious person who looks down their nose at others from a pedestal of self imposed deprivation while making that particular character trait the basis of their personality has changed over the years, and while making a punchline out of someone who deliberately doesn’t own a television or who is a vegan may or may not be earned, I can sense “person who is off social media” becoming that trope. Have I enjoyed social media and do I think there is pleasure to be derived from it? Yes! Do I think social media is ultimately good for society and that the benefits outweigh the drawbacks? No, or at least probably not, but I’ve thought that for a long time and it didn’t stop me from participating as a user on those platforms for years. Did the negative effects of social media on a societal level have something to do with my departure? Sure…. but c’mon. I don’t have a leg to stand on or a high horse to sit astride here.

The leg I do have to stand on is my right to make decisions about my life based on what is enjoyable or good for me as an individual. I deleted my Facebook around 2018-19, deactivated my Twitter account for a while around that time as well and then 86’ed it for good in 2021. I’ve outlined my gradual withdrawal from Instagram above. The primary motivating factor in all of these decisions was the simple fact that it reached a point with all of these platforms where the negative effects and bad feelings they were giving me were greater than the positive feelings and benefits they were providing. I could feel my attention span shredding¹ . I was comparing myself unfavorably to others; their careers, their creative successes, the good times they were supposedly having. I was (in spite of curating my feeds) ingesting things that sparked outrage, anger, and hatred at levels that bogged me down in misery rather than motivated me towards action. I found myself reaching for my phone automatically to fill any moment in which I was not otherwise engaged with some other stimulus.

How much of this was me? Sure, I was reading How to Break Up With Your Phone and How to Do Nothing and orienting myself toward a future with less digital interfacing, but what about the platforms themselves? I am of a certain age of people who can remember being introduced to the internet and witnessing the dawn of social media. I was too young for Friendster, but I was a Myspace kid, and was in high school when Facebook expanded their user base by no longer requiring a college email address to make an account. Facebook used to be fun. I used to have a blast trading inside jokes with friends by posting on each other’s walls and commenting on photos taken with someone’s digital camera. I had some upperclassmen friends in high school² , and when they went away to college, I was glad I had a way to keep in touch with them. Poking! Remember Poking? Twitter kept me abreast of current events and had a lot of funny people, Instagram had its meme pages and thirst traps, good times were rolling. It used to be an enjoyable experience to use these platforms and that experience got progressively worse over time³ . Undoubtedly, the actions of these companies and the people running them contributed to that negative experience for me, but socio-political turpitude aside, we lost the chronological timeline! Endless scroll is bad! Google is all AI slop, Amazon’s search results are all weird knockoffs and sponsored posts. This is not the internet I was promised or enjoyed for a few years!!!!

AND YET with all my frustration and naysaying, I had that reminder in my phone juuuuuuuust in case I decided to keep my Instagram. This is what has been giving me pause, along with the number of times over the last year and a half where I unconsciously pulled out my phone to stare at its glowing screen, mind scrambling to figure out how to wring some dopamine out of it. It is a compulsion I am gradually getting under control, or diverting towards something actually worthwhile that my phone can provide like opening up my photos app to look at pictures of friends and family. But I do feel like I am deprogramming part of my brain that has been intricately rewired over the course of 20 years and that such an endeavor might take a long time.

I’m at a loss for how to wrap this up because I don’t want to be preachy or pooh-pooh (or is it poo-poo?) an activity that gives someone respite or happiness in a shitty, rapidly deteriorating world, but I do think we could all benefit from logging off a bit. If you’re worried that the time you spend on Twitter might instead be put toward a useful activity, fear not! I have been making great strides forward discovering even stupider uses of time, such as watching this video of a guy “stealth camping in a roundabout” that really just amounts to him sitting in a shrub and drinking a few beers. What, you think cutting down on screen time is going to turn you into some hyper-optimization productivity freak? I didn’t post here at all last month - I am living proof that you can continue to live as unproductively as you please! I don’t know folks, whatever gets you through the day. Take care of yourselves!

¹ I’ll say that I think a wandering mind is healthy though, and I am a little skeptical of the idea that “focus” as an unqualified good (what is it we are being asked to focus on?)

² Not to brag!

³ Cory Doctorow has written extensively on this subject, coining the term “Enshittification”. I would recommend his writing heartily.