Maybe social media isn’t my biggest problem
I’m sure most of us on Bear Blog are no stranger to the sentiment that social media — in its current algorithmic, addictive, and data-harvesting iteration — is a plague upon society. And broadly speaking, I agree. What I'm trying to say is that I subjectively don't feel much better or worse off, with or without social media.
I grew up in a world where social media was ubiquitous. I also grew up with unregulated Internet access. This was a bad combination for a young teen, and I was aware that I was getting increasingly hooked on scrolling. TikTok and its short-form relatives were beginning to take off in earnest, and I became nervous that it would rot my brain for real.
So when I was in high school, I deleted all my socials in one go. I expected it to free up more time for me to be productive and do the things I actively enjoyed doing. I thought that would be the end of my already-chronic procrastination issues and my worsening mental health.
What actually happened was that I still had to fight my brain to do anything remotely worthwhile. I did get more free time, which I instead spent on a constant rotation of various unsatisfying distractions: trashy books, video games, and picking up and putting down random hobbies.
Most frustratingly, my mental health issues didn’t magically resolve by putting down that damn phone. It didn’t stop me from comparing myself to others, nor did it stop me from self-isolating and self-loathing.
When I got to university, Instagram became the default way of keeping in touch, so I ended up biting the bullet and signing up again. I still have it to this day, but I’m not exactly a daily active user. I use it in a pretty restrained fashion — I have all features blocked (using MyInsta) except profile viewing and DMs, so no feeds or reels.
Sometimes I get invited out to stuff via DMs. Sometimes my friends send me random posts or expect me to repost a story for a group hangout, to which I also don’t mind obliging. I use it so infrequently that it’s not really taking over my life or my head.
A lot of self-help advice involves cutting detrimental habits out of your life. I can’t really disagree with that. I’ve just had difficulty managing myself enough to substantially improve my well-being, so it subjectively feels like I’m not that much happier. I’m still suffering from good old-fashioned analog misery. So I suppose I still have a lot of work to do.