I Deleted Social Media for 30 Days

I did not delete social media because I was enlightened.

I deleted it because I was tired and my screen time was four hours a day and I looked at that number one morning and felt genuinely embarrassed by myself. That was the whole reason. No spiritual awakening. No book that inspired me. Just a number on a screen and a flash of something close to shame.

I gave myself thirty days.

I told nobody.

That was my first mistake.

The first week was fine. Boring, but fine.

I kept reaching for my phone out of habit and finding nothing to reach for. I read more. I slept earlier. I started noticing things I had been walking past for months; a bakery two streets from my flat that smelled extraordinary, a cat that sat in the same window every morning on my way to work, the fact that my neighbourhood had a particular quality of quiet on Tuesday evenings that I had never once registered.

I felt clean. Slightly smug about feeling clean. Told myself this was what real life felt like.

Then the second week started.

My friend Sarah texted me to ask why I hadn’t liked her photos.

Not whether I was okay. Not what I had been up to. Why I hadn’t liked her photos.

I explained I was off social media for a month. She said oh okay and then nothing for twelve days. Twelve days of nothing from someone I had seen every week for four years.

When she finally texted again it was to tell me about something that had happened to her. Something significant. And I realised as she was telling me that she had already told the story on Instagram a week earlier. She had already processed it publicly, received her comments and her heart emojis and her you’ve got this messages. And now she was telling me the flat version. The already-told version. The one with no juice left in it.

I asked how she was really doing.

She said she was fine.

I did not believe her.

I also understood, for the first time, that I had not actually known how she was in a long time. I had known her highlights. Her captions. The photo she chose from seventeen taken. I had confused that with knowing her and she had confused it too and neither of us had noticed.

My sister stopped inviting me to things.

When I asked why, she said she had posted about them and assumed I’d seen it.

My sister had been communicating with me through Instagram for what I later calculated was at least eight months. Events, news, things she found funny, things that upset her. All of it going through the app. All of it, I now realised, never quite reaching me in any way I had actually held onto.

She was not a bad sister. She was doing what everyone was doing.

We had all quietly replaced conversation with content and called it staying in touch.

The hardest one was a man I had been seeing.

He was not my boyfriend. We had not defined it. But we had been whatever we were for about four months and I had thought it was going somewhere.

When I disappeared from social media he did not reach out to ask where I was. He did not text more. He simply continued as before, which is to say he liked my posts when I posted and occasionally replied to my stories and had, I now understood, been doing exactly enough to stay present in my peripheral vision without doing anything that required actual effort.

Without the posts, I was invisible.

Without the stories, there was nothing for him to react to.

Without the app, there was apparently nothing between us at all.

I sat with that for a few days. It was not comfortable to sit with.

Then I texted him directly. Said I’d love to see him. Asked if he wanted to get dinner.

He said he had been really busy lately.

And that was the last time we spoke.

Week three I stopped expecting the phone to be active and started noticing who reached out without a reason.

Two people did.

My friend Marcus, who texted on a Wednesday afternoon to say he had heard a song that reminded him of something stupid we had done in 2019 and wanted to know if I remembered. I did remember. We talked for an hour.

And my mother, who called on a Sunday not because anything had happened but because she said she felt like hearing my voice.

Two people. Out of everyone.

I do not say that to be dramatic. I say it because it was clarifying in a way that I was not expecting and could not have found any other way.

On day twenty nine I downloaded Instagram back.

I posted nothing. I just scrolled for about twenty minutes.

It felt like walking back into a party I had stepped out of. Everyone was still there. Still talking. Still performing and laughing and sharing and reacting. The party had not noticed I was gone. The party never notices when anyone is gone.

I closed the app.

On day thirty I deleted it again.

Not because I had become someone who does not use social media. But because I needed one more day to sit with what I had learned before I let all that noise back in.

I use social media now. I am not going to pretend I don’t.

But I use it differently. And I think about it differently. And I hold it more loosely than I did before, which turns out to be the correct way to hold something that was never meant to be the whole thing.