Why I Left Social Media - and What I’m Doing Posting this Here on LinkedIn

It was July 2021. I had been intending to leave social media for quite some time. I’d done a couple of dry-runs already, stepping away from social media for a month at a time on 2 occasions leading up to this point, and proving to myself that not only did I not miss it during those dry-runs, but that virtually everything else in my day-to-day life improved just a little bit as a result of having all of that new-found time on my hands - not to mention focus and available attention that I could allocate to other, more important, things.

Why did I even want to stop using social media anyway?

I was never one to post a lot, or document the things that were going on in my life too often, but over the course of a few years, I started to take note of the amount of time I was losing to apps like Instagram, mostly consuming (read; doom-scrolling), and I began to question why I was falling into this trap. Of course, the answer to that question is both simple and also known to most of us; social media platforms are indeed designed to keep us tied to them, and to harvest our attention as aggressively as possible. After all, attention is, as they say, the single most important currency in today’s social media world.

I would find myself starting my day doom-scrolling through useless - but incredibly interesting - content for the first 20+ minutes of my day, before even climbing out of bed. My bathroom breaks turned into IG ‘explore’ sessions, and my day would always end the same way it started; sometimes losing an hour or more down some Instagram rabbit hole, only to be left with a sinking feeling of potential sleep - and actual time - lost, with no discernible benefit to speak of.

I was also feeling like the advertisements that were being served to me on Instagram were somehow relevant to even the things that I’d never once searched for or typed into any device, but rather had only spoken about in conversation with people in my physical presence. As it started to happen more and more, and after reading about it happening to others, I decided to test it… with worrying, but unsurprising results; my devices were indeed listening in, and advertising to me based on my personal conversations (and not just English conversations either). Yes, on one hand, the relevance of the ads I was seeing had a certain value, as they were pushing products and services that were truly well-targeted to me and my wants and needs. But on the other hand, it left me feeling a bit like I no longer had any privacy. I’m not alone in feeling that, as I’ve spoken to countless other people who share the same sentiment - although I think that in today’s evolving digital landscape, it’ll be increasingly impossible to avoid, and might be better to simply come to terms with it.

I’ve worn several social media hats

For context, I want to mention that I was no stranger to social media reach; I leveraged it to build a martial arts company that I co-founded with business partner and lifelong friend Matt; we ran it for more than a decade, using various social media platforms as the main driver of growth, before selling the company a few years ago. We had 165k Instagram followers, 150k Facebook followers and 55k YouTube subscribers, plus I managed aggressive social advertising campaigns for that business (and a handful of others as a consultant) over the course of a 5 year period. So I’d say I’ve been exposed to at least some degree of what success looks like in social media, even if by today’s standards those numbers are not necessarily anything to write home about. But those very metrics - like follower counts - have always represented part of social media’s toxicity for me.

Facebook

My first baby step was leaving Facebook; I started using it in 2006, and it became more and more cumbersome as time went on. So leaving FB wasn’t such a big move for me, mostly because I was hardly using it anymore in 2021 (is anyone even still using it?) It felt like Facebook became obsolete for my generation of Millennials and everyone younger, other than the practical benefit of using its tools to manage ad campaigns for business, and for the surprisingly well-trafficked Facebook Marketplace, where I’d buy and sell all kinds of household items). As far as I can tell, the only folks I know that are active on Facebook still today are 60+, not sure why that is really - not going to explore that in this post.

Anyway, once I backed up all of my many years of photos and posts from Facebook, I formally de-activated my account, and immediately felt some of my personal RAM free up. It was a good start.

Twitter & TikTok

For better or for worse, I never really got into using Twitter, and I’m thankful for that because I am pretty sure I’m a person that could love Twitter, as it seems to be where a lot of smart people gather and share a ton of smart things. For better or for worse, I dodged that bullet. This meant one less platform to detach from.

Same goes for TikTok - perhaps the most soul-swallowing of all of the social media platforms. I’m quite glad that I never even got as far as installing the app or creating an account. I initially believed it was something for younger folks than me, but it turns out that my dad, who is in his 70s, sends me TikToks quite regularly ???Nevertheless, another bullet dodged, another platform I don’t have to worry about removing from my daily routine.

Instagram & Youtube

Finally it was time to take a good look at the 2 platforms that accounted for the majority of my daily social media time commitment - and frankly a pretty sizeable chunk of my day in general; Instagram and YouTube.

I firmly believe that the driving forces behind the success of these 2 platforms are quite different one from the other;

Instagram, at least from my perspective, thrives on a seriously toxic set of algorithms that relentlessly steal people’s time, focus, energy and spirit - and it doesn’t offer a lot in return, other than alarmingly relevant advertisements, a skewed view of the world and/or skewed expectations for one’s own private or professional life and sinking feelings of personal inadequacy ??.

YouTube, on the other hand, has always represented a source of new knowledge for me. I can’t begin to recount just how many skills I’ve learned and developed directly from YouTube content. Yes, I have always - and still do - dedicate a ton of time to consuming videos on YouTube, but somehow I am not left with that same sinking feeling that Instagram and other social media platforms leave me with, and instead I am generally left with a feeling that my time on YouTube wasn’t wasted, or not completely wasted anyway.

And although YouTube does definitely employ an aggressive attention-hungry algorithm of its own, aimed at keeping users engaged and continuously moving from one video to another in a seemingly (or let’s be honest, virtually) endless fountain of content… And although I know that YouTube also employs data from my conversations to target highly-relevant ads to me… I also feel like YouTube isn’t necessarily a true social media platform in the way that’s relevant to this article, and its business model and general structure results in a platform that doesn’t ruin people / turn people’s brains and souls into mush in quite the same way - but rather it very often leaves us feeling inspired to undertake the things we learn there. Of course, that’s not true for all content on YouTube, not by a long shot… but if you think about it, most people aren’t YouTubers / creators - most people are YouTube content consumers, so it’s a bit of a different vibe than platforms like IG, Twitter or TikTok in that and as a standard content consumer on youtube you’re not really subjected to that whole toxic downward spiral of posting and documenting your daily life in the hopes of some sense of validation from peers/followers. Yes, YouTubers definitely have to be aware and careful of the potential effects of falling into that trap, but for the vast majority of us (myself included), YouTube just doesn’t present that danger.

And so I decided to leave Instagram behind, protecting everything it had been stealing from me for so long… and to keep my trusted and beloved YouTube around as a source of learning, knowledge and yes, entertainment too :)

It’s been more than 2.5 years now, and I must say that I feel like I’m missing absolutely nothing, and enjoying the benefits afforded by the fact that IG is no longer part of my life. I’ve also convinced a handful of the people in my circles to do the same, and those who have, have consistently reported the same positive outcomes ??

LinkedIn

Wait, this very article is posted on a social media platform!

Fair enough. So what am I doing posting on LinkedIn then?!

LinkedIn has always been something I’ve admired from afar. I never dedicated myself to it, mostly because I spent a decade running a business that focused on other social media platforms, and I never had a need to build a career-focused network. In 2018, while finishing a UX Design certification at BrainStation, I was prompted by the course coordinators to set up a LinkedIn profile to interact with the cohort, and I reluctantly joined this social media platform that I had successfully avoided until that point.

But curiously, after accessing, and using LinkedIn on an admittedly uninvolved level for a few years, I started to come to the important conclusion that somehow LinkedIn also doesn’t present quite the same toxic dangers for me that Instagram does (although it definitely does on some level). Because LinkedIn is predicated on being a professional environment instead of a personal one, somehow I believe that I can maintain a healthy and balanced relationship with the platform, and I want to explore how I can use it as a writing outlet, without the opportunity costs that platforms like IG or TikTok would represent for me.

An outlet for my writing

To be honest, I’ve been looking for an approachable and suitable writing outlet for quite a while, and I have a pretty sizeable Notion database of article plans that I’ve been keeping for some time too. But I never felt like taking the leap of starting a formal blog of my own - too much commitment I think, especially for someone who has already got probably too many active personal and professional projects on the go at any given moment.

So this is my very first post, to kick off what I hereby publicly commit to be an ongoing writing practice ?

Frankly, I am not even necessarily expecting many (or even any) people to read these articles that I write… rather this is an undertaking aimed at giving me a place to channel some of my ponderings.

What you can expect

Long-form exploratory / observational pieces on such topics as;

• Design (web design, UX design, industrial design, etc)
• Strategy (brand strategy, business strategy, marketing strategy)
• Project management & product management
• Operations management (systems thinking, notion workspace architecture, etc)
• Software automation & exciting platform integrations
• Everything E-commerce
• Everything Notion
• Mental models & conceptual frameworks
• Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu
• Wine, viticulture & wine education
• Continuous learning
• And probably a lot more fun, quirky randomness that drives my general enthusiasm and curiosity for things in the world

If you’ve gotten this far, I really do thank you for joining me for this ?????Please comment on this post with any ‘book’ emoji to indicate that you read this ??????????????

Thanks! See you next time

???& ??

Important note: This article, like all articles I publish, made no use of artificial intelligence whatsoever. All words, thoughts, observations and expression in this piece are 100% human-generated. I recognize the value and opportunity that AI technology represents for us, but when it comes to these articles that I write here, the primary goal is to fuel my writing practice, and so I avoid any and all use of AI tools. Not sure if this even matters to anyone reading, but in today’s world where it’s pretty hard to know what a human produced and what a machine produced, and I figured it was worth mentioning.