I think I'm at about 3 and a half years straight of having no social media. I had Instagram intermittently a few years ago, but I can't remember the first time I fully deleted it. I'm talking like completely deactivated the account not just deleting the app off your phone or anything. I could in theory reactivate the account whenever I want to yet I never feel a need to. In theory I could reactivate the account at any time and be back on. I've gotten used to it now, but in the early days I honestly think it was revulsion that kept me off it. Every time I would get an itch, download the app, reactivate my account and start scrolling I'd get locked in. Eventually I'd put my phone down and get a little grossed out with myself.

This is just my experiences being the first generation exposed to parasitic social media. I make that distinction because technically stuff like mySpace and Tumblr was slightly before my time and also prior to the general decline of social media as a whole. One could argue the early iterations of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter etc weren't parasitic by design either. I distinctly remember getting Instagram when I was 13 or 14 back when it was just a list of pictures from people that you followed. The apps still made the universe feel small and contained. There was only so much you could get exposed to and therefore only so much to compare to.

Nowadays social media serves no purpose. Absolutely none in my opinion. When I say that everyone always tries to argue "Oh it's good for knowing what people are up to" to which my response is always "for the people that matter to you, you know what they're up to". If someone isn't close enough to you for you to know they were on a 2 month trip across the world then really what is that knowledge changing in your life? Besides potentially inciting a twinge of jealousy that someone normal, someone you know even tangentially is travelling the world. It lets you ignore all the context around the thing being perceived and leaves it to you to fill in the blanks. That person could be going into crippling debt to go on that trip. Or they could have just been laid off, lost a family member, been going through a rough patch and that trip is their way of forgetting whatever is going on. But you only see the fact that they're travelling the world and you're not. Again, what benefit could this possibly bring to your life? Some artificial notion that someone in your third or fourth ring of social influence is on an idyllic trip to the other side of the world while you're stuck working.

If we move past the notion that social media is good for keeping tabs on people the only other purpose is to suck time and attention away from your real life. The fact that there are hundreds of brilliant engineers at every social media company who's entire purpose is to keep you glued to your device for as long as possible is terrifying to me. We know that human psychology is open for exploitation. In fact I'd argue humans have gotten extremely good at exploiting each other and in the last century or so specifically really good at exploiting each other's attention. The scale of technology has allowed billions and billions of dollars to go into researching the most effective methods and algorithms to exploiting people's attention.

As a result, it's really hard to extract yourself. I still struggle with mind numbing dopamine on a daily basis. I've got literally everything possible deleted off my phone, even Strava, but still the YouTube shorts in browser get me. I can't figure out how to properly get rid of those in a way that isn't easily reversible. I think in the current day there's really no winning against social media companies in the long run. You just have to keep fighting against it each day, every time you sit down to eat dinner alone, every time there's a little void of stimulation in your life.