This is part one of a (hopefully?) five part series I’ve written on my break-up with social media. I hope you enjoy it. I hope that if you don’t enjoy it, you can make up that lost time with something better in the future.

When I was young, I remember wondering if a song I hummed or a poem I had written had ever been hummed or written before. I made up little stories, wondering if I was the first girl to have thought up that plot line. As I grew up, and gained more opinions and on deeper topics. In high school and college, I wrote papers and had new and fresh thoughts, I felt that again, that feeling of “I wonder if I’m the first to state these opinions in this way!” Then I aged more still, and the internet grew into a place for all people to share all their thoughts— constantly. I would read a blog, I would view a post, I would watch a video, and two things happened:

1. I began to feel there was nothing original. Nothing new under the sun. My friend and I who always made that weird face at each other across a crowded room? That wasn’t unique to us. The interesting thoughts I had on politics? Other people had them, too. The cute thing my toddler said that I thought was something special? Yeah, you guessed it, a ton of other toddlers did the same thing.  
2. I began to think my own thoughts a little less often. If my thoughts are not unique and we are all in the same globalist mush pot, what does thinking your own thoughts matter? A slow boil of others’ viewpoints surrounded me until I had marinated in those thoughts so much, so long, and so often, that they became my own.

But, then things got worse.  Eventually, I came into to descend into the lowest level of mindless consumption the internet had to offer: short form video content. Though I never joined the platform that started it all, TikTok, I gladly ate up Reels and Shorts: The junk food of the internet. I could consume, and consume, glut and bloat on hundreds of videos where everyone was like me. I would sit in bed, next to my husband. He with his Instagram Reels and a headphone in, me with my Reels and an earbud, and I would occasionally emit a blast of air through my nose that couldn’t even be called a full laugh, hit “share,” and send it to his Instagram with 3 laugh crying emojis  and the message “omg this is totally us” and so we would volley back and forth, back and forth. Sitting in bed next to each other, in the dark, letting out horse snorts, laughing when things were “just like us”.

And when I got to that lowest level of Dante’s Internetferno, where I had effectively taught the algorithm to give me countless mirrors of my own marriage, politics, parenting, friends, and life, I realized it was true: I had far less of a unique life and far less original thoughts than I thought I did. My life was just like everyone else’s (except those people have bigger houses and nicer cars). There was no point in sharing what I thought with anyone, because we were all the same. I felt I had probably not had an original thought in a long time. My brain was monotony.

And so? I decided to revolt. I couldn’t shut the internet down, I couldn’t run around like a mad woman telling everyone else to do so, so I did what I could for me. I rebelled and cut myself off. I would no longer participate in the mindless funnel I had been spiraling down. I would replace that time spent in an endless scroll of videos with better things. And frankly? It’s not hard to find something better, because nearly anything legal (and some things illegal) would still be better than the mindless scroll to which I had become addicted. 

I deleted my social apps. I deleted the time sucking apps. I stepped away and was ready to be my own person! I was an adult! I could refuse to be a part of the newsfeed! How hard could it be?

It is embarrassing to recall how many times I unlocked my phone to search for Facebook or Instagram. My fingers were like blind kittens looking for their mother’s milk. I was looking for that sweet little blast of dopamine. I would search the neat little grids on my phone, and remember I had deleted the apps and there was nothing for me there.

To what could I turn that would be as easily satisfying and gratifying as a new notification of a like, a message, someone sending me another video that was “just like us”? Nothing. What meal is as easily prepared as it would be to open a bag of Doritos? What dessert can be made as easily as ripping open a package of M&Ms? I realized, I couldn’t replace those “just like me” moments with something of equal low effort. 

I was no longer able to watch the hour by hour updates of my friends. I comforted myself: At least I had the numbers of many of those friends! And I had kept messenger as a way to keep in touch with friends without being bogged down by the scroll. Social media is about being social, we can be social apart from that! These people liked me, I liked them. They could no longer see my daily life, nor I theirs, but that didn’t mean we would lose touch! With no memes or videos to send, I checked in with friends and had to say something more in depth than a laughing emoji and “this is so us”.

Have you ever moved away and had friends promise to keep in touch with you or visit you, and then years later, no one has made the trek and most of them forget about you? That’s what happened. I moved away from socials, and all the people whose kids I have watched grow up, the acquaintances whom I had liked and hearted everything from their first sourdough to their 3rd marathon, the people who dropped comments on things I posted and sent me latent likes? They just disappeared into the ether.

I was actually shocked. Oh, sweet, naive Rachel. I had felt that I had more to bond myself with these social media friends! I thought we were closer than we were, because we interacted every day. Reading each other’s thoughts, looking at each other’s pictures, and finding our “just like me” similarities. It turns out, when you move away from socials, you are out of sight, and therefore out of mind. I can’t tell you how many friends I texted or messaged to let them know I was thinking of them or to ask for a life update and got either nothing or something that shut down the ability or need for further dialogue in response. I’ll admit it. I’m a total nostalgic sap and I really love people, so it actually hurt at first. But then I realized: this, too, was good for me! I needed to be broken of the “my friend on Facebook” way of thinking. Not everyone on social media was my actual friend. We were placed in the same social media soup at the same time, and that murky broth was the only thing binding us in the same bowl. We really had nothing of substance between us, and I needed to get it through my clingy, little homeschool kid soul, that being in the same soup does not a friend make. It takes hard work, love, accountability, care, concern, conflict, aggravation, frustration, and reconciliation to build true bonds. I still think about these people. Some of them were friends from childhood, some my adolescent years, others from mom groups with whom I had become “close”. These were once in person friends and these were always internet friends, and once I was no longer playing by the rules of Millennial online over sharing? I no longer existed. My phone grew quieter still.

(Stay tuned next week(ish?) for part 2!)