Why I Can't Escape Social Media
I was raised under a very strict no social media household. When my friends were ranking each other on MySpace, I was limited to anonymous profiles on Teennick.com and writing forums because my parents wouldn’t allow me to create any formal social media profiles under my real identity. I was on my hands and knees begging for a Facebook profile for most of my freshman year of high school, embarrassed I had to keep in contact with my junior high friends either through Skype or my mom’s Facebook profile since texts were still charged by the character limit. Finally, at the start of 2010, my parents allowed me to create my Facebook profile (under the condition that they would be my first friends on the profile) - my first dive into the social media craze sweeping my generation.
13 years later, I’m on my hands and knees again. But this time, I’m desperate to leave the platforms.
I’ve had an interesting relationship with social media over the years. It was rarely a very healthy connection, but I can’t deny that sometimes it was the only thing to get me through some tough times. In the beginning, my fascination and obsession with social media could be attributed to the novelty of the concept. Smartphones and social media were just getting popularized at the height of my high school experience. It was the first time we had access to each other’s every thought and movement without having to be in person. We all monitored our feeds religiously, keeping tabs of relationships with the same vigilance as watching TV shows and deciphering cryptic song lyrics posted by those wanting attention. Photos were rare as most of us, at least in my lower middle class social circles, still had to carry a digital camera around to keep track of special events. There were no random selfies as we went shopping, no expectations for major announcements to be an entire photographed affair. Yet we posted too much about nothing and not enough about everything at the same time.
By college, social media was more popular and a necessity as I moved states away from all of my high school friends for a cheaper education. However, the world still hadn’t figured out how to monitor or control the impulse to post to these channels for all of everyone to see. My college experience was defined by “social media guidelines” set by the various organizations I was a part of - no photos of alcohol on Instagram, don’t display your sorority letters if you’re posting pictures of a party, don’t ruin your future with posts whining about how hard finals are. The strict rules kept me on edge for the majority of my college experience, especially as I attempted to grow a career as a social media influencer catering to a younger demographic while balancing the experience of living an independent life away from my parents for the first time. I remember a party I attended my senior year where we all smoked cigarillos to celebrate the end of our college tenure. While everyone else basked in the frivolity of our youth, the novelty of enjoying the parents-gifted tobacco, I spent most of the time vigilantly watching the DSLR camera someone brought to the party and subtly hiding my own cigarillo whenever the lens was pointed in my direction. Even though I’ve never smoked tobacco before or after that moment, I didn’t want to convey the wrong idea about my indulgence into a new experience and I couldn’t control whether or not that person would choose to post the photos to social media.
You’d think that the answer to this issue would be simply “just don’t post anything” but it was incredibly hard to enforce that mindset at the time. It’s still very hard for folks now, myself included. The initial novelty of the new social media platforms had trained my generation to post everything and anything about our lives so our aunties from across the country could comment “So cute! Enjoy this time of your life!” and we can prove to our peers that we’re just as cool as they are. We want to show that we’re successful to the world and the easiest way to do that is not by working hard chasing corporate ladder dreams, working to make meaningful connections with people, or working to be a genuine person because those all, you guessed it, require work. The easiest way to post pictures of an event, slap a filter on it, choose a cleverly worded caption, and let the post represent your success in life. Why let the quality of your life speak for itself when you have apps that tell the story of your life as you craft it?
After college, with all of my friends from college and high school dispersed across the country, social media was my only option for social connection. I had very few in-person friends by the time I returned home. For me, social media became my only outlet to make friends and get attention. If it didn’t happen on social media, did it even happen at all? I couldn’t stop the impulses created from my high school youth to post whatever I wanted while also staying within the strict parameters from my college era to only post what was “acceptable” to post. This combination ensured that my social media was curated to a perfect persona that was barely a shadow of my true self. My goofy tweets and gorgeous bookstagram posts hid the fact that I spent most evenings by myself drinking whiskey and playing Assassin’s Creed: Unity (the worst Assassin’s Creed, btw) because I had no one else to hang out with. I wanted to look cool and collected for all of my internet friends, not allowing them to see my complete lack of self-confidence and insecurity about not having that stable post-grad life that everyone else seemed to find. I hated comparing myself to all of my college classmates posting their never-ending successes to social media, from new jobs to engagements to babies, when I couldn’t even catch a break with finding a stable job, but I couldn’t escape it. I had tied my hopes for the future to my growing “career” as a YouTuber and social media influencer through my books. Removing myself from social media would mean removing myself from my hope that I’d be able to find success in my life and I needed that hope to get me through my darker time. It also would’ve removed me from my very few social connections I still had in my life that weren’t just my parents or my dog.
Finally, I was able to find that stable post-grad job, ironically, through a Facebook post advertising the position. I found real life friends at that job that I could grow in emotional connection with. I was able to accomplish my personal life goals and dreams through this job. I found that improving my life outside of social media reduced my need to use social media as a form of validation (go figure). I still post to social media because I still value the connections I made through the internet and, honestly, still require the attention during my lonelier times. But lately I’ve been finding it grating to visit the sites. Especially around the holidays, that self-comparison game sneaks into my social media browsing brain without my knowledge. I find myself getting upset reading how old college classmates are expecting baby #2 when I don’t even want kids right now. I’m just upset at the possibility that I’m missing out on that mysterious desire that other people have to have a slew of kiddos, but would never be aware of that FOMO if it wasn’t for social media.
It’s a conscious effort to be happy for people on social media, not jealous or upset at myself, even though I’m pretty secure and happy in my own life. The easiest solution would be to close myself off from social media, deleting my accounts and only posting when I need to announce a new book to quit the self-comparison game, but I can’t without cutting my existing online connections. Facebook is where my dad and I send each other silly videos and memes to stay connected when we live apart. Instagram is home to all of my internet friends and old co-workers that still occasionally check in to make sure we’re all doing okay and not losing our minds to our respective chaotic lives.
The only social media platforms I’ve been able to (mostly) successfully quit have been YouTube and Twitter. YouTube is because I stopped cultivating my community there and all of my YouTube friends also fled the platform after the algorithm chasing got more hearty than the meager reward offered after catching it. Twitter is because an egomaniac billionaire bought the site and all of my friends fled the platform leaving my feed littered with corporations and bots. If you notice, the common factor between these two sites and my ability to quit them is because they could no longer offer the social connection I crave from my social media. They stopped providing that value to my life.
It looks like I’m locked onto social media for the time being. This has good and bad consequences. I’m learning that not everything has to be posted online to prove that I’m living my life the best. Instead, I’m working on finding that satisfaction on my own through various self-help podcasts and books (shoutout to Feminist Wellness and Just Break Up, btw.). Instead of posting photos of big life events for the entire world to see, I send them directly to my friends who could care and grow in that personal connection to them. If I don’t send my friends the pictures, I still take pictures and videos for myself and my memories rather than for the rest of the world.
To keep my relationship to social media healthy when it’s been mostly a toxic sludge pile for me in the past, I just have to remember my original core desire to be on the platform: to make social connections. If that means staying on social media so my dad and I can trade hundreds of cute puppy videos a day, so be it.