Why Having No Social Media Is Better For You

I Have No Social Media

To start with, most authors tried having no social media for a week or two, or quit for months. I’d argue that they haven’t experienced the true value of no social media yet. It is because they are treating it as a temporary experience, and they’ve always have a fallback plan on going back.

Personally, I’ve been social media free since Facebook was out for a few years, which means no less than 15 years. I had a Facebook account back when I was in high school, deleted it after a few years. Then, haven’t had anything since.

The Major Benefits Of Being Social Media Free

You Are Not Longer A Product

You know the phrase “If it’s free, you are the product.”, right? Social media is free, so, you are the product. The companies use your binge watching behavior to make profit from other companies by selling ADs to you. You might get entertainment out of the exchange of time, but does it help you with progressing your life? I really don’t think so. Don’t get used like an idiot, you could do better.

More Time

Time is the most valuable element on earth, not money. You have to drill this fact into your brain and always remind yourself this. I always hear people complain about not having enough time to do what they want. Yet, when you look at what they do during lunch break, after work on the bus, or before bed, what do they do? They use their time on social media sites like Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Facebook, etc. Scrolling away their real life which is happening at the moment for the cause of the others. Or even worse, one tenth of the time were spent on advertisement.

Just by not using social media at all, you got your half day back after work or study, everyday. You can utilize these spare time to enrich yourself in what you really interested, a skill that could take you somewhere. Or, just be in present with your loved ones.

Stay Focused

No matter what you try to achieve in life, you’ve got no more distractions to affect your mindset. Pictorial memories stays in our brain longer and easier. Which means images and videos tend to take up our memory spaces. By not watching random videos on the phone, you are essentially giving your brain a break, and some spare spaces to allow you to learn new stuff and do meaningful things.

The Downsides of Having No Social Media

No Common Topics

Yup, your friends and co-worker will be sharing some trending topics you don’t know about. You might feel bad about it and hard to join in. But, here’s the thing, you can ask what happened if you are really interested in it, if not, you can skip it. It’s a conscious choice instead of forced engagement. Besides, most trending topics, are never a must-know. If they decided not to talk to you just because you missed out on some internet topics, they are not your friends anyway, don’t waste your time on them. Focus on your goal.

Can’t Reach Out to Old Friends

This one is kind of an issue. Some friends I made who lives or moved aboard. All I have is their phone number from where I met them. But they travels. So, there will be some point in life where they changed their phone number, and I will not be able to contact them anymore.

To workaround this, I can either ask for their number from their home country. Or, just open a social media account, just to keep their contacts. I have yet to create an account for that, but I might have to. However, I am a software developer, I kind of want to create a form of contact exchange book to exchange email addresses. That way, people don’t need to rely on (toxic) social media, but still, really, just keeping contact.

Missing Out (?)

FOMO - Fear of missing out is a common human psychological behavior. People don’t want to be kept uninformed even though it could be information they don’t need and want. I see this as false negative.

While it is true that I don’t know how my once best friends at school doing now a decade later. But, he or she is just one call away to chat with. I don’t need to know how they are doing everyday. Give me a summed up version during an afternoon tea where we will be meeting in person. I believe it means more than texts and likes.

How to Quit Social Media

It is easy if you’re determined. Just delete all the social media apps and accounts.

Yet, that’s usually not as straight forward, because you’ve got memories and on-going interactions on them, right?

So, the more approachable action would be the following:

1. Delete all social media apps on your phone. Keep the accounts.
2. You can keep messenger for chats but not the doom-scrolling platform app.
3. Use it only via desktop websites in the browser.
4. Get some Chrome extensions to eliminate the random natural of recommended feeds such as:
   • DFTube - For distraction-free YouTube experience
   • News Feed Eradicator - Replace all the homepage feeds for major websites like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, and so on with inspiring quotes.
5. Turn off notifications for everything else other than friends message.

That way, you can filter out the first layer of noises from these platforms to avoid the triggers of impulsive behavior due to their hooking design nature.

Final Note

Having no social media makes me want to think and act independently. Not because of what other people telling me to, but what I intentionally want and need to. All individuals behaves and learn differently. Yet, social media as a whole is an echoing chamber for certain voices. Sometimes for the good, sometimes for the bad, and most of time for the controversials. It is our job to stay sane and objective in matters not related to us. Meanwhile, spend time with ourselves, working on ourselves in ways only we know best.

It’s social media companies job to keep you hooked, but it is our job to not let it win and focus on ourselves instead.

Side Note

I made an app called ZenTube which is available for iOS. It is basically a distraction-free YouTube client for you to manage and watch YouTube in an intentional way. This is just the teaser I launched to achieve my vision - intentional technology and softwares that can help individuals with studying and working on their goals. If you are interested, you can bookmark the link Intenca or subscribe to the RSS of this site as there will be updates once its ready. Which should be out in a couple months.

Thanks for reading, I hope you can get something out of this.

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