How to Survive Social Media
Back in January, I wrote a blog post about how I can never fully quit social media. If you want a quick TL;DR for the post, despite my unhappiness on the platforms, I’m forced to remain active on social media to maintain social connections and meet my professional goals. Since writing that post, I’ve been experimenting with different options to better curate my social media experience to make it enjoyable again rather than something that weighs my soul down and adds unnecessary dissatisfaction to my life. I really do believe social media can be a great tool, but more often than not I’ve found that I corrupted my perception of it after years of doing the micro-influencer grind (which I do not recommend) and following the societal obligations of what I “should” do on social media rather than what I want to do.
Finally, six months later, I’ve created a great combination of methods that works for me to fulfill my obligations forcing me to stay on the platforms while preserving my sanity. Believe it or not, taking these small steps allows me to actually work with social media in a better capacity than before and, to allow myself some hyperbole, I feel like these changes have substantially improved the quality of my life too. Hopefully some of these tips work for you too if you’re feeling the same exhaustion I was feeling with social media, but find yourself similarly stuck with being unable to fully quit.
#1: Delete the Apps (Keep the browser)
Can’t delete your social media profiles? No problem - just delete the apps. I’ve found that most social media sites are dismal to use on the mobile browser. Instagram, specifically, is pretty much unusable as a mobile browser site. Uploading content is a miserable experience, the Instagram Reels feature only shows about 5-7 videos at a time before giving up on itself, and I could not be more thrilled at how worthless the site is in this capacity. I lacked the self-resilience to limit my time on sites until I moved to the mobile browser.
The magic thing that no one tells you either is that you can re-download the apps at any time. They’re free. It only takes an extra minute from your day. So whenever I do need to upload a photo or just want to check out Instagram Reels for more than three videos at a time, I just re-download the app, do my business, and then delete them again. This has been more effective than me than any anti-social media app, such as Forest (although I love Forest), and I can attribute 90% of my success with reducing my time on social media to this method.
#2: Unfollow Anyone Not Active in Your Life
Another successful method to minimize my time on social media? Literally downsizing the amount of content on my social media. How did I reduce content? By unfollowing anyone not active in my life, especially celebrities.
In my reflections on what was keeping me on social media, I realized that the main purpose of social media for me is to keep up to date with people in my life. People active in my life don't include Ashley Tisdale or the ex-boyfriend of a high school classmate. So I got rid of them. I literally unfollowed so many people at once that Instagram put a soft block on my account to prevent me from unfollowing more people. I then waited until the soft block lifted, then unfollowed more people. Now my social media is only what I truly care about and it’s easy to catch up on. I don’t need to spend hours on it to see everything that was posted since my last visit.
You don’t have to be as dramatic as me. One thing recommended in my anti-social media research was to make a list of all of the content that makes your stomach drop or eyes roll or FOMO flare up and get rid of it. Whether that be makeup videos or wedding photos or vacation shots, you don’t have to engage with that content. It’s your social media. Make it what you want it to be.
#3: Find a New Hobby
Social media eats up a lot of time. A surprising amount of time, actually. Once you get rid of it, there’ll be a void where it used to be. That void will beckon you to return to the sweet siren song of social media to fill it because that’s what your habits are used to. Do not abide to the void’s beckoning. Resist the allure of easy scrolling and cheap dopamine hits.
What you do instead is find a new hobby. Anything to fill the void. For me, I’ve increased my reading habit and try to keep a book handy for the express purpose of reading it when I normally would’ve scrolled through Twitter. I also have been writing more, which has felt more substantial for me to create than social media posts at the moment. But there’s plenty of other options too. Crafts such as crocheting and knitting can keep your hands busy while watching TV rather than scrolling on your phone. There’s puzzles, coloring books, Legos….literally there’s so many other things in this world to enjoy rather than social media if you want to engage with it. Humans survived for centuries without TikTok and allowing themselves to get a bit bored at times. You got this.
#4: Turn Off Notifications
I’ve been following this advice for so long, I forgot how legitimately good this advice is. The first rule of social media should always be to keep notifications off. I even had notifications turned off during the peak of my social media influencer days. There’s literally nothing so important on social media that you need a push notification to be alerted to it. Not even DM’s because if someone truly knew you or needed your attention on something, that message should be sent via text, email, or a phone call. Likes and comments can be addressed when you’re next available to check social media manually.
Notifications only serve as a hook to get you back on the app outside of your own time. Turn them off, let your time be your own, and don’t let social media command your life.
#5: Go Touch Some Grass
When leaving the digital space of social media, there’s nothing better than embracing the physical space of the outside world. You don’t have to touch grass. After all, my idea of a good outdoor hobby is reading on my hammock. But the outside world is incredibly fulfilling to experience without the lens of capturing the moment for social media or the distraction of endless doom scrolling. When you reduce access to your digital community by reducing social media, the community offered in the physical world can fill that gap. Visit a coffee shop, take a walk, and embrace the outside world as it exists outside of everyone else’s posts about it. I promise, no matter how you experience it, the real world is much more substantial than the world on your phone. You just need to take a step into it.
#6: Take Pictures for Yourself/Friends - Not Social Media
One thing I loved about social media is taking photos for it. My near daily food shots chronicling my cooking adventures brought me great joy during the COVID lockdown. My Bookstagram was lit back in the day and I authentically loved the monthly challenges given to me to take pretty photos of books. But it was also stressful to attend events or take photos of something with the mindset of “which one will I post to represent this entire experience” lingering in the back of my mind.
After I worked on moving my mindset to only taking photos for myself or to send directly to my friends, the events and experiences in my life improved. I was able to continue my enjoyment of taking pictures without the expectation of meeting some obscure benchmark of quality so it would be good enough for social media. I literally went on an entire vacation and didn’t post a single photo from it. Guess what? Still enjoyed the vacation. I just put the pictures on a digital frame in my house for my personal enjoyment or send them directly to my friends who care. The entire world doesn’t need that unnecessary access to my life and I don’t need the stress from providing the world that access to my life that I don’t want to give them. Some memories are just for me and that should be okay.
#7: Don’t Stress Metrics
Say it with me….LIKES. MEAN. NOTHING. Do you know what a like on a post means? It means someone clicked “like” on your post. I literally “like” pretty much every post I see. Sometimes it’s because I authentically like the post and honestly sometimes it just means “I saw this post”. Likes are just a way to gamify your content on the app. That engagement means nothing.
Honestly, the biggest thing that killed my patience for social media was when I forced myself to post every day to keep my metrics up, which is just silly. Because again, it doesn’t matter. Or, at least, it shouldn’t. The people who want to see your posts will see them. The people who like your posts will like your posts. It shouldn’t matter more than that.
#8: Dear God Delete TikTok
Oh my god TikTok is the worst time sucker of any social media app. Please delete it. It’s literally designed to take as much of your time away from your life. I’m incredibly biased though. With my issues with my self-time management, TikTok once claimed an entire valuable day of PTO from me. I deleted the app the next day and haven’t gone back in three years and it’s been great.
However, I know it’s incredibly beneficial for other people. Small businesses thrive on the platform since most of the world is addicted to it. My friends still send me links to TikToks to keep me socially connected with them. But for me, personally, my first step to reducing my time on social media started with deleting TikTok. For you, it could be deleting Facebook or Instagram or Twitter instead.
Identify your weakness and then destroy it. It’s probably TikTok, but do your own thing. If you’re going to stay on TikTok though, can you at least wear headphones when you watch them in public? No one needs to hear those audio clips against their will.
#9: Make It Spark Joy
Like anything you spend time on with your life, make your social media spark joy. If that means unfollowing all celebrities, great. If that means only logging in during a full moon to catch up on everything, super duper. You get to define your social media experience the way you want to define it. You shouldn’t have to feel obligated to post every day to meet an impossible metric threshold or keep following your aunt’s neighbor because you followed them by accident and it would be rude to unfollow them after they just liked your last picture about your dog.
Make social media work for you, don’t work for social media. For me, sometimes that means posting to social media again. Again I legitimately love posting pictures about books and talking about reading with others in the community, which is a conversation best served in a digital space. Other times, it means abandoning social media for weeks at a time to live my life in the outside world again to refresh myself.
It’s about balance and what works best for your life. These are the tips that allowed me to find that balance and make social media spark joy for me again. Hopefully they help you too or at least provide some insight into how you can better survive social media despite its horrors. Because it is low-key horrible. We shouldn’t know this much about each other at all times. But, that’s another conversation for another time.