On quitting social media

2/1/25

I feel most at home in airplanes. I was in an airplane in the womb, twice. My mom travelled from San Francisco to Delhi and back when she was pregnant, once in economy and then in first class. The thing about a plane is that there isn’t cell service or internet, so nothing pulls me to reality. It’s an imposed break. A break we need.

This thought came from two places, ironically both from social media. One, a subway take on shutting the internet off once a week. Two, a tweet from Patricia Mou on phone parking lots.

I “quit” social media at 15. I use quotation marks because I’m still on Facebook and Twitter, but those aren’t addictive. Facebook’s useful for selling things and finding housing, and Twitter is for quotes and news articles. So you could say I quit trying to carefully curate an online presence on social media at 15.

I remember posting a selfie once in high school. After clicking publish, I waited for a red heart shaped notification to pop up. Every like, comment, and new follower was a point of validation for my existence, a virtual signal of societal acceptance.

Slowly I lost myself. I couldn’t understand whether I was doing something for myself or for social media. I couldn’t understand the songs I liked. Did I like them because of my own taste or because everyone was listening to them? What about the clothes I wore? My dreams and aspirations?

The breaking point was the physiological effect - the anxiety in my chest. After posting something, my nervous system turned on. My heart raced, attention span shortened. I’d check my phone every few minutes because my teenage brain equated my own self worth with the numbers.

I deleted Snapchat and then Instagram. It wasn’t easy. I thought I’d lose all my friends, so I re-downloaded Snapchat a few times, but made the final cut right before I went on a trip. It’s been 7 years. I made an Instagram once in college, but it seemed so unnecessary that I deleted it quickly afterwards.

One of the perks of getting older is that you get to know yourself. I spent most of my younger years trying to change who I was, going by other people’s definition of success. Then I turned 20 and met a group of people that I felt so comfortable being myself around that it changed me. They gave me permission to be myself - my Honey Singh, qawwali listening self who started an oatmeal business once and likes farmers markets. There’s an Arundhati Roy quote about this:

“She was perhaps too young to realize that what she assumed was her love for [him] was actually a tentative, timorous, acceptance of herself.”

I read this quote once, then again and again and again. The love or liking I had for these friends was a tentative, timorous, acceptance of myself. This was a place I could let my hair down and be, which is something I couldn't do within myself.

Then came a standard 20-something awakening. I looked inside myself, which is still an ongoing process. I’m not totally there, and maybe I’ll never be, but I’ve gotten surprisingly far in just laying bare who I am and accepting it. We are once children, then we grow up, and something or the other is bound to go wrong in the process. Then we spend some time, usually our twenties when everything goes to shit, accessing what went wrong and what we're carrying. We may not rid ourselves of it, but we look, without judgement.

I won’t establish causality, but quitting social media helped this process. I ended up quitting a lot of things since - drinking, friends, relationships - and it’s been nice.

After social media comes the issue of my phone. I am truly happiest when I get to enter a room without my phone. I’m thinking of corepower yoga classes, but it can be applied anywhere as long as it’s reasonably safe. Which is why I want a place where people can be without their phones, you can throw your phone in a phone parking lot, or better yet, give up a smartphone for a dumb phone.

P.S. I made a substack!