Leaving Social Media

Shared reality, learning from babies, making friends, and what Instagram can't see

First, I must acknowledge the irony of posting this essay on Substack: If you leave one social media platform and don’t post about it on another social media platform, did it even happen? Anyway, jokes aside, I hope you enjoy this week’s Story from Scribbleland. If you get anything from it, please do subscribe and share with a like-minded friend.

Growing Up in The Jungle of The Internet

I entered into a new kind of place, a place unbound by tradition or shared social mores. I walked, in my yellow sundress and high-heeled sandals, into a jungle.

I was 14 years old when I underwent Gen Z’s unofficial coming-of-age ceremony: logging onto social media. Facebook was first. Instagram followed. 

Although my entry into social media echoed the Edwardian debutante’s “coming out,” this modern version couldn’t be less alike. I didn’t enter formally into a ballroom of familiar faces to dance the waltzes I had practiced since girlhood. Instead, I entered into a new kind of place, a place unbound by tradition or shared social mores. I walked, in my yellow sundress and high-heeled sandals, into a jungle.

At first, it wasn’t bad. The platform had not yet been flooded with influencers and ads. My feed contained my friends’ posts, and that was about it. No stories, no reels, no Kardashians. Mostly just pixelated, B&W selfies of insecure middle-schoolers and their dogs. We would chat back and forth in the comments sections, oblivious to any outside observers (especially our parents). 

But the unstable digital environment soon began to change. 

By 2016, everyone was on Instagram (even our parents). It began to impact social customs in real life. After I met someone new, my first instinct was to scroll the grid of their Instagram profile with a practiced eye. After five minutes perusal, I could sort them into one of two piles: cool or uncool.

The criteria shifted constantly.

While members of Edwardian British society felt pressure to stay fashionable, their clothing styles changed slowly on an annual basis, and their social mores remained stable.

In the last decade, American mainstream fashion has gone from skinny jeans and plaid to cargo pants and crop tops. As Günseli Yalcinkaya observes in an essay for Dazed, “The world is splintering.” Even the term “mainstream” has little meaning today, drowned in a flood of insulated and constantly shifting subcultures. 

As for social mores—those are jumbled too. Young women, schooled by feminism, have expectations of young men that often go uncommunicated. Young men, stymied, turn to Reddit and join internet movements like the Red Pill. Both groups attempt to impose draconian social rules artificially on a social scene that has none, and, in the process, end up more confused and divided than before.

The term “shared reality” was coined by two psychologists, Hardins and Higgins, in a 1996 paper to describe how people establish “a sense of both social connection and understanding the world.” 

In an era of my dreams and my truth, we enjoy individualism’s freedom of self-determination. But at what cost? We’re losing collectivism’s stability, our sense of shared reality.

With unstable norms for how to dress, believe, and behave, the pressure mounts to spend inordinate amounts of time and energy on “keeping up.” Today, what that “keeping up” requires, in practical terms, is lots and lots of screentime.  

As I navigated my teens, I grew used to living, at least partially, on social media. Even on days when I didn’t open the app, I judged myself by its metrics. My mind formed into the shape of a square frame, a camera’s viewfinder. Captions scrolled through it. 

I was anxious. I was fashionable. I was playing the status game. For a long time, though, I didn’t see this as a problem.

Setting My Priorities Helped Me Define Tech Boundaries

In the jungle of the internet, I was shoved to and fro amid the vast horde of competing companies, influencers, and apps. In college, I sensed I was losing control, and I wanted out. The fall of my sophomore, I drove a car over my iPhone in a fit of Luddite rage.

But after only a few months with a flip phone, I bought a cheap Moto smartphone and reverted. I needed Google Maps for a summer in Germany, and with it, reintroduced all the distracting apps I had determined to shun.

This pattern continued. My iPhone and I would break up, get back together, break up, get back together. I didn’t know how to balance my desire for modern conveniences with my desire to escape compulsive scrolling and internet surfing. 

One commonly-cited effect of pornography is how it reduces men’s drive to pursue sexual relationships in real life. Once I exited college, social media began to stunt my social life in a similar way. It offered ersatz interactions just appealing enough to keep me complacent. I didn’t have to go through the slog of trying to make friends in a new place if I could post a pic at my own convenience and get a stream of hearts in return. Not only was I missing out on “shared reality” online—being online was making me miss out in real life.

It’s easiest to follow the path of least resistance. But when I became a mom last year, I looked at the squirming, bright-eyed baby on my lap and decided I no longer wanted to. 

It wasn’t my protective instincts that drove my exodus from Instagram. I wasn’t worried my child would become an “iPad kid,” her brain rotted by a constant diet of YouTube. At least at this stage of development, such harms were not yet possible. Infants, with their lack of object permanence, are limited by nature to the present moment—touch, taste, see, smell. 

I left social media because I wanted a closer relationship with my baby. Because, being a baby, she had “opted out” of technology by default, if I wanted to be with her, I would have to join her.

“Unless you become like a child…”—Jesus’ words from Matthew 18 echoed in my mind—“Unless you become like a child, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.” 

My baby, at less than 1 year old, was already teaching me by example.

My child’s example of presence never fails to inspire me.

With this newfound clarity, I targeted the specific apps and features of my phone that prevented me from staying present. Instead of throwing out my iPhone, I used its Screentime feature to identify timesucks. If I caught myself aimlessly staring at screens, I changed the display to grayscale. 

Now, I could keep Google Maps without buying into Instagram, Facebook, and X. It just required a strong “why” and some intentionality.

At 24, a decade after creating my social media accounts, I deleted them. 

What Instagram Can’t See

Since leaving social media, my life has been, in most respects, perfectly ordinary. Perhaps I’m more emotionally stable. I certainly waste less time. If Instagram’s influence was subtle, being off Instagram is similarly difficult to quantify. But there’s a new grace that shines in my interactions with people. 

Now that I’ve left social media, I don’t know whether my acquaintances are good at self-marketing, whether they know how to pose in photos or construct an on-trend persona. I don’t get to believe they are my friends because I saw their wedding photos in my feed.

Instead, the people I meet are black boxes, mysterious and unpredictable. The only way to remove that mystery is to gradually unfurl to one another over a long process of walks, tea times, and conversations. 

Together, in real time, I must do the hard work of co-creating a shared reality.

Comfort in someone’s company, long silences—in essence, real relationships—that’s what I’ve desired all my life. That’s what I’m striving for now. And those are exactly the things that Instagram can’t see. 

I was encouraged to share this story by Ruth and Peco Gaskovski at School of the Unconformed. They are asking people to submit stories about how they are fighting back against bad tech habits. If you have a story, consider sending it to them! At any rate, I’d love to hear a bit of it in the comments.

Living Unconformed Lives in the Digital Age: Share Your Story