On Actually Logging Off
With social media splintering, an opportunity arises
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¡Hola Papi!
I’ve had a rocky relationship with social media. I’ve been off Instagram for five years now (it made me insanely jealous) and Twitter for about a year (I was tired of nonstop bad takes). I was off TikTok for six months as well (I could not stop scrolling), but I recently redownloaded it thinking I had sufficiently cleansed myself of my unhealthy consumption habits. Unfortunately, I’ve fallen back into them, and I think it may be best for me to be offline altogether.
The thing is, though, the prospect of being completely offline makes me anxious about my ability to connect and keep in touch with my friends, family, and society in general. Part of why I got back on TikTok was because I felt out of the loop on so many things during my abstinence. There was stuff happening that my friends would discuss and that I just had no idea about. Sure, discourse about celebrity relationships or whether a new movie is good or morally corrupt isn’t important in the grand scheme of things, but when it’s what everyone else is talking about it’s hard not to feel like it is important, at least as a point of entry in a conversation.
Still, I just don’t think it’s good for me to be exposed to what’s online anymore. It exacerbates my worst instincts, makes me extremely negative, and keeps me from doing things I actually find fulfilling. I could, in theory, try again to form a “healthy” relationship with one or some of these platforms, but their algorithms are specifically designed against that and I think my chances of successfully resisting them are slim to none. I grew up very online and made a lot of my close friends as a teen through fandoms and common interests in music, movies, etc., but that model for relationship-building doesn’t feel sustainable at this point. I’m just scared that I won’t be able to replace that model with a new one and I’ll end up feeling even more alone than I already do.
I felt like you would have particular insight into this predicament. I hope you don’t take that as a read.
Sincerely,
Reluctant Luddite
Hey there, RL!
You’re asking me how to log off? What will you do next with your precious time on earth? Ask a fish how to take huge successive gulps of air on land? Ask an Italian-American woman in New Jersey how to swear off cheetah print? Perhaps the pope has some tips for you on leaving Catholicism for Scientology?
Sorry, I’ll do my job now. I’ve actually been discussing this a lot lately with my friends in light of the ongoing splintering of social media: Could this be an opportunity to reform our relationship to the internet altogether? For many years, social media has been an unquestioned pillar in my daily life. Like you, I “grew up” with it, and I think watching it evolve alongside me has given me the impression that it’s natural, a fact of contemporary existence, as familiar as highways and waterworks.
Of course, it was never Pangea — the weight was distributed across a handful of platforms, some of which have since gone the way of the dodo — but, still, there was a feeling of centrality to the project. It just doesn’t feel that way lately, and I find myself wondering, not without some excitement, what would life look like without this thing?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not going to be deleting my accounts, throwing away my devices, moving to the woods, stumbling across a handsome carpenter named Björn whittling away on a table (I am out picking berries), marrying Björn in an intimate ceremony in a meadow, moving into the wooden cottage he made for us, and living out the rest of my days working on an illuminated manuscript to be discovered and celebrated decades after my death. It’s just not practical. I have “close friends” stories to publish to hot people I barely know on Instagram.
But what I am doing is taking more seriously this idea of “you are what you eat” when it comes to my digital diet, and harnessing the recent instability of social media as a whole to make room to interrogate its place in my life. I think the first step in doing so, for both you and I, is asking the question: Do the potential setbacks of not using social media as much outweigh the potential positives that could be on the other side of logging off? It’s not a rhetorical question! It takes some thinking. So let’s… think.