I believe that everyone at one point in their life will try and leave social media. I mean, there are so many pros to doing so. Social media can be a huge detriment to mental health! It can take up a lot of storage on your phone! And if you’re like me and have spent a whopping 6+ hours on your phone DAILY (or more), then you know that social media can be a huge time waster. That was my main issue with it.<\/p>\n
I wanted to utilize my time better in the new year and with mindlessly scrolling through social media taking up the majority of it, it seemed like a no brainer!<\/p>\n
To start, I posted a message on my Snapchat story on December 31st saying that I would be leaving social media for 2021. I then gathered the phone numbers of close friends who I previously only communicated with through social media, just to be sure we could still keep in touch. And with that, I was ready to leave Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, and TikTok by January 1st.\u00a0It didn’t take long for me to realize that I am waaaaay more dependent on social media than I thought I was.<\/p>\n
On January 4th (only four days later!!), I re-downloaded Snapchat and Instagram.<\/p>\n
Something I hadn’t taken into consideration was my school work. I was in the middle of filming a documentary project for class and I had to schedule interviews with my subjects. And the main way I was communicating with them was through Instagram and Snapchat, and I didn’t have any of their phone numbers.<\/p>\n
I knew I would have to keep Instagram and Snapchat installed until after I was done with the interviews, so I decided I would only use them to communicate with my subjects. No posting on either of them or mindlessly scrolling through feeds or stories… and oh boy did that last a whole two seconds.<\/p>\n
While I continued not posting anything myself, I found myself scrolling through Instagram more and more. While TikTok and Twitter stayed uninstalled, I made up for the time I’d wasted on them with scrolling through Instagram’s new “Reels” feature. It wasn’t the same, but at least it filled the time.<\/p>\n
For the three days I was off social media, I was very productive. I finally put away all my Christmas decorations and cleaned my room up from the aftermath of The Week Between Christmas Day and New Years’. But after re-downloading the apps, everything went back to being the same.<\/p>\n
This entire experience, all four days of it, taught me that I depend on social media to connect with people. I don’t regularly check-in with old friends or classmates, I enjoy seeing what they post and knowing what they’re up to! Usually, social media is dropped because the user is using it in an unhealthy way. I don’t see myself as using social media for validation or for comparing myself to others. I use it to stay in touch with the people I care about and keep myself updated on what’s happening in their lives.<\/p>\n
I eventually re-downloaded TikTok. Twitter will probably stay gone forever, but the other three are here to stay. I still have to work on managing my time better and not getting sucked into the time-wasting vacuum that is the Instagram explore page… but maybe that’s a problem of next New Year!<\/p>\n
I think I’ll probably try leaving social media again another day, hopefully with better results, but until then…<\/p>\n
Follow at @addisonleigh.l on Instagram!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I believe that everyone at one point in their life will try and leave social media. I mean, there are so many pros to doing so. Social media can be a huge detriment to mental health! It can take up a lot of storage on your phone! And if you’re like me and have spent … Continue reading “I tried leaving social media (and failed )”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":54,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.msabrookhaven.org\/literary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11131"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.msabrookhaven.org\/literary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.msabrookhaven.org\/literary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.msabrookhaven.org\/literary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/54"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.msabrookhaven.org\/literary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11131"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.msabrookhaven.org\/literary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11131\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11135,"href":"https:\/\/blog.msabrookhaven.org\/literary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11131\/revisions\/11135"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.msabrookhaven.org\/literary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.msabrookhaven.org\/literary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.msabrookhaven.org\/literary\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}