Why I deleted my social media

notes from the underground

I did it. It took me almost an hour to figure out how to do it (Meta sure doesn’t make it easy to divorce yourself from its dystopian maze), but I did it. I deactivated my personal Facebook and my personal Instagram account. I also put an ‘away message’ on Born of Wonder’s Instagram and have no plans to sign back in.

I first created an Instagram in 2012. It was 2009 the first time I signed onto Facebook. That’s over a decade of my life lived on and through these social media sites. Of course it wasn’t always the way it is now. I didn’t have a smartphone until I was graduating from college in 2014. There were no social media apps and no ‘stories’ so the sharing was more random, less curated, and in fits and starts. I distinctly remember huddling around a laptop in the library, digital camera plugged in, as my friends and I laughed over the 100 or so photos we had taken the night before. They were ridiculous and unstaged, badly lit, at strange angles, and filled with inside jokes. We would upload them all en mass, no editing needed, into public albums on Facebook with titles like “Saturday Night on the River LOL” and the album would collectively receive one or two ‘likes’ and many more comments from people who had shared in the nights’ antics.

I’m not saying it was perfect (and in many ways was the definition of oversharing) but it somehow seemed more innocent than the way it is now, with filters and hashtags and reels that look more professional than what film majors were creating less than five years ago. Social media is big business - for Meta, but also for “content creators” who get #paidpartnerships. Social media became less about sharing and more about curation, an ideally presented version of ourselves and our lives that we put out into the world in highly filtered ways for ‘likes’ - and often, directly or indirectly, for money. And that makes things complicated.

I like to think of myself as an authentic person, but recently, when I went back through some old posts in my archive, I realized how inauthentic I was being. Looking through old Stories things looked amazing - I was living the life! and it actually took me a while to realize that some of those posts were coinciding with incredibly difficult times in my life. It’s not that I was lying or trying to be untruthful. I wasn’t even trying to hide difficulties, it’s just that in many ways I am a private person (about the tough things), even as I ‘shared’ lots of pretty photos of home and animals and eventually babies and toddlers.

I assume everyone is doing this. Some people call it a highlight reel, and I don’t think that’s necessarily wrong, except that no one thinks of it that way. We assume this is real life - and it’s just not.

Even when people ‘get real’ on social media - posting a photo of the disastrous pile of dishes in their sink, a whispered confessional style video for ‘close friends’ on Stories… There is always a tidy caption and a lessons learned. There is usually a filter and there is always the awareness of an audience. There simply cannot be the real, earned intimacy of one-on-one friendship. When you are posting with a wide net, the same post for your family member, your best friend, your coworker, your college roommate, and the high school acquaintance you haven’t spoken to in fifteen years - you aren’t forming a real relationship. Who are you talking to?

Of course this wide net has its benefits. When I posted about nursing struggles or asked about sleep issues or shared (incessantly) about my love of the Scottish Highlands I would often get back some enthusiastic direct messages - “Me too!!!” And of course this “me too,” as C.S. Lewis so eloquently said, is the beginning of friendship.

And I have made friends through social media, particularly through Born of Wonder. They are real friends - friends that I send voice memos with, write letters with, send notes for baptisms and birthdays, and turn to for advice. I am so incredibly, incredibly grateful for the connections social media has brought me. But here’s the thing - you have to fight against the App, against the Algorithm, against What It Is to achieve this sort of real connection. You need to take those relationships off the app for them to become something with dimension and purpose.

I hope to continue to make these sort of meaningful connections - here on Substack, through the podcast, through my writing more generally. I don’t need Instagram or Facebook for this.

So here’s what it came down to for me. Here’s the ugly truth: I just can’t handle it. Maybe you can - maybe you can put boundaries on your life and your phone use and log in every now and then and not think of that social media sphere ever again. So for those of you who use social media in a truly casual way, who don’t fall into doom scrolling or overthinking or comparison, this will all sound very dramatic. But I think for many people, especially young people, social media has played an outsized, disproportionate role in their life. It has hijacked areas of their brains related to dopamine and reward and it has robbed them of their attention spans. This is a real, crushing problem. This is serious.

I’ve done months long fasts and then, like a true addict, logged back on and spent hours of my life binging - ‘catching up’ scrolling incessantly, posting updates frantically, and then we’re back at square one. I’ve tried logging in one day a week, or two days a month, all to no avail. This is partially because I’m still thinking in “Instagramese” even when I’m not on the app. I’m taking photos and thinking of a caption.

I want to live the kind of life that doesn’t have captions, or hashtags, or a like count.

I was recently catching up with a friend who hasn’t been on social media in years. I always really enjoy our catch ups because they are actually catch ups. I haven’t been watching her Stories from afar and ‘liking’ them. I thought - I want this to be the norm! I want to have coffee with my friends and hear from them how life is going, the good, the bad, everything in between. I want to have phone call check ins and voice memos recounting the day’s events. I don’t want filtered content for the masses but honest one-on-ones with the people I care about.

Chris and I have talked about how we’d like to start sending out a Christmas letter with our cards every year with family updates. Well what would even be the point if I've already updated everyone day by day for the entire year? (I should note Chris hasn't had a social media profile for years now).

What really drove all this home for me is having kids. My beautiful, sweet children who I strongly believe deserve to be protected - in their innocence, in their privacy - as they grow and learn and encounter this big beautiful world. As they grow and live and write their own stories I don’t want them butting up against a public narrative I have already created for them.

Jo copies everything I do. So the other night when she was tugging at my skirt while I made dinner and I said, “honey don’t be obnoxious, you’ve got to wait a minute,” she started going around saying “you’re obnoxious,” which is not something I want her to say or to think about herself (as cute as it is to hear a two year old’s pronunciation of “ah-nox-iousss”). So I really need to watch what I say.

She wants to wear a hat like mama, she wants to read a book like mama, and if she sees me on my phone, she wants to swipe, swipe, swipe like mama. So I started feeling like a hypocrite. I kept reading study after study about the dangers of social media and screens for kids - the whole time I’m agreeing, nodding my head, thinking how awful! as I log in and scroll some more. What’s wrong with this picture?

My kids are part of my life. You’ll hear them in the background of podcasts and I’ll share here on Substack what we are reading, enjoying, and so on, but their faces, their silliness, their individuality, isn’t for mass consumption. These are my kids, not “content.” Even though I only ever shared photos on private accounts, it still felt odd to me. I think of my own childhood, lost in the wilds of my own imagination, reading stacks of books, picking flowers, making up games with my sister, so much of it undocumented. I have no memories of my Mom sticking a camera in our face. And I certainly wasn’t wondering what caption she was writing with that cute photo of me reading. I want to preserve that sense of self, that freedom to be, for my kids. Heck, I want to preserve it - and rediscover it - for myself!

When

Tsh Oxenreider

shared what it was like a year after she logged off Instagram for good, I got some real practical advice about how to actually sign off. I was also reassured that you can continue to be a writer, a creator, a participant in society, without these apps. And that’s all they are - apps - That you decide to download or not. And you can decide not to download them.

Here are a few things that I think have made it relatively painless for me to walk away from social media.

1. I frequently print my photos and I scrapbook a lot. I know a lot of people are attached to their digital archive (understandably) but I actually have been pretty consistent about printing out photos at least twice a year. I have scrapbooks, framed photos, and drawers full of prints. I’m not worried.

2. I love letter writing and sending out Christmas cards is one of the great joys of my life, so I have an updated Postable list with most of my friends and family’s emails, addresses, phone numbers, etc. so I don’t worry so much about losing touch.

3. I live in the same community I grew up in. I’m not unmoored somewhere in a foreign country or deployed or living across the country from all my friends and family. My Dad lives twenty minutes away on our family farm and I frequently run into people at the grocery store who have known me since I was a little kid. I feel safe, I feel connected, and I feel like I have in person community I can call on when I need.

There’s a lot more I could say about social media and why this was the right choice for me (and I probably will in future essays). But I think for a lot of people that full ‘delete’ - that final ‘sign off’ - is an existential question mark. As

Annelise Roberts

shared so honestly in this essay, “Is Instagram the narcissist?”

“[I had] this pervasive feeling that I was in danger of being erased. If I wasn’t on social media, how would people know I exist?” [my emphasis]

I think this is a bigger fear than most people are willing to admit. Even if you’re not creating ‘content’ or chasing sponsorships or hoping for a book deal, even if you’re just sharing cute photos of your family and your latest vacation and your dog chasing squirrels, you are shouting out please, please see me. This is so human! We want to be seen, we want to be known and loved and validated. We want to share. All of this is so, so good. What beautiful impulses. What deep, real needs these are.

I think that is why I get angry thinking about how these apps have manipulated these vulnerable, real desires for the sake of their bottom line. As I scrolled through a woman’s Instagram recently I was really taken aback. This was a woman whose cancer journey I had followed through Instagram - a beautiful woman of faith with four young children who was reaching the end of her treatment options. Her posts were filled with deep, gut-wrenching feeling, conviction, and honesty. I know so many people were inspired (myself included) by what she was willing to share with the world. But as I scrolled her posts I would frequently be barraged by an ad - Babybjorn, Trips to Scandinavia, Baby Clothes, A New Stroller for Travel - man, this app knows me - and it was disconcerting and awful to see this woman’s battle with illness unfold in between flashy ads. There is nothing wrong with what she is doing. She is sharing the human experience in its fullness and rawness. But this awful app is using her willingness to share, and my willingness to follow along, as an opportunity to sell me stuff.

I suddenly had the ickiest most dystopian awareness of what I was participating in.

enough is enough.

Wendell Berry rang in my ears, Everyday do something that does not compute […]

I wanted to thwart the algorithm. I wanted to be unfindable and unknowable, not a hashtag or a bio line or a tagged photo in someone’s story highlights.

I had a lot of excuses for not deleting the apps - My groups! Facebook Marketplace! I want to write a book! And I know there are things I will miss. There will be inconveniences. But what will it open up for me? What quiet in my head? What books will I read? What will I write?

We will see.

I made the decision to deactivate for the summer and do the full ‘delete’ at the end of August if I’m still as convicted. Join me in the experiment this summer? Let me know if you’re deactivating - comrades in arms and all that. (side note - the deactivation was important for me, rather than just deleting the apps - which I’ve done many times - I wanted to have no social media footprint. If people want to find me, they’ll have to actually contact me, not check my Timeline. I also have no self control and I needed not to be able to log on.)

In any case, I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments. And needless to say, my twitchy need to click around the web has not gone away in a day (shocking) so I’m checking Substack a lot. While we’re here let’s make this is a space of openness and ideas and debate.

I look forward to even more time to discuss and write here with all of you.

cheers x

Katie