I quit social media. Here's why

i was never allowed to be on social media as a teenager the first time i really got personally exposed to these sorts of platforms was at the age of 19 when i created my first instagram account always having been a bit of a weirdo one of the reasons being my lack of social media i always thought that finally downloading them and joining them would make me feel a bit more accepted what i did not expect however was instagram making me feel more like an outsider the platform has always made me feel uneasy for various reasons the fact that normal everyday social norms do not seem to apply the fact that its growth rates have followed that of suicide rates of young teenage girls and in general at this point it feels almost like a rebellion to not be on the app which is absolutely ridiculous in this video i have put together the reasons that have made me quit instagram over the last few months let's get started my first issue with it was the fact that i felt that i was surrounded by so many fake connections and these were actually with people for whom i carried a lot so people with whom i hadn't been in contact with for a very long time who live in a different city or a different country right now and people that i really care for but because i haven't actually talked to them in such a long time by just leaving likes on their photos or by just leaving kind of meaningless comments of a few hearts or this looks great or congratulations on your baby or graduation i felt as though i was getting the illusion that i was actually in touch with these people when in reality i really wasn't so in the end of the day i was feeling much more isolated ever since i've quit for example when i've thought of someone which i haven't thought of in a very long time i'm much more inclined to kind of send them a message or organize a call or a meet-up which is a lot better and a lot more meaningful than this oh yeah i know what's going on with them because i've been following their stories but it's not really that connected at the end of the day now i feel so much better even if i spent 15 minutes on a facetime call with my mom than if i would spend a few hours a day just scrolling through instagram and being connected with people i like and care for there's an expression that says that depression requires a certain level of privacy and i feel like that is the danger of social media because while you are actually in private and you don't have any meaningless connections you're under the illusion that you are not so you end up feeling worse and worse over the long term next is that i see a huge difference in the world online and in the world in reality i feel like people act very differently on these two different platforms in reality i feel like people are a lot kinder they are a lot more accepting there's a lot more jokes and forgiveness when mistakes are there people are very genuinely supportive and kind while online i see people saying things and doing things that i've never seen in real life and it just makes me feel quite sad when i'm surrounded by so much negativity this beautiful show that one of my favorite people they're around us um regarding anonymity and the fact that when we think that we are anonymous and people don't know who we are everyone is much more likely to be a lot more sinister and to cause harm onto other people i do genuinely think that social media can bring out the worst in all of us and i just don't like to be in that sort of environment next i feel like social media was setting goals in my life that i never really wanted now i don't feel as though i'm the sort of person who compares myself to others a lot but despite that when i was on instagram i was often feeling that my exam grades weren't good enough that i wasn't doing enough with my life that i'm not dressed well enough that i don't have enough bags or electronic devices or i'm not going on good enough holidays or to nice enough restaurants it was absolutely ridiculous not only did i have to fight against this constant promotion of consumerism but i felt very often brought down and feeling as though the things that i saw around me were not good enough on social media we just picked the best parts of our lives to show and it creates this skewed picture of normalizing things that are just not normal most people that i know in reality are not going to amazing holidays very very often or multiple times a year most people that i know do not own chanel bags most people that i know are not going to amazing restaurants and crazy parties every single weekend so i feel as though when i'm surrounded by only real life people and not their online versions of themselves i am comparing myself to their real life personas which is a lot more healthy than comparing myself to their online personas which can make me feel very very bad next has to do with the instagram algorithm and i very often hear people telling me that oh if you just wait on instagram long enough your feed will turn into what you want it to see because instagram will show you what you want and i disagree with this the algorithm is programmed to show us what we are interested in and what we are spending time on and not what we like or what is good for us and these two things are vastly different sometimes i'm interested in things which are actually not that good for me i can go down rabbit holes that are making me feel worse and worse but i just can't tear my eyes away from and all the algorithm will know is that this is content that i am likely to spend my time on so it will show more and more of it to me so my feeds don't tend to be healthy they're not only funny memes and jokes but they are very often things that just make me feel sad and unhappy just because i find them interesting and i love the expression that as a human being it is our responsibility to create ourselves to the decisions we make and the environments we choose and as we'll find we have been creating ourselves all along even if unintentionally i feel as though this is definitely what's happening with instagram because the default option has become to have it it feels as though you are not making a choice and you're just doing what is normal and what is average by staying on this platform while even not making a choice and staying on it is a decision so i felt for me personally i needed to kind of take action in designing what i'm doing and because instagram has generally not brought many sort of benefits to my life i think it was a lot healthier to curate my days and my experience of consuming things around not having instagram at all there's this phrase that says you start playing because you want to have fun but then you continue playing because you want to avoid being unhappy and this was definitely what happened with me when it came to instagram so i felt like it was genuinely time for me to just stop and leave something that prompted me to make this video was a documentary that i saw on the like button it touches not only on the history of it and how it came to be but also how it has shaped our psychology as a society in making it acceptable to like or dislike things and how it affects us and our everyday life this was a very very eye-opening experience for me it's not a very long documentary i would definitely recommend that you watch it um i saw it on curiositystream which are very kindly sponsoring this video as i'm trying to be a bit more intentional with my online consumerism curiosity stream is definitely up there with the things that i do like to spend my time on it has a bunch of documentaries which are very well filmed very well short and just leave me feeling great if you stand for curiosity stream which is actually ridiculously cheap you also get access to nebula which is a platform where a bunch of us creators are putting our videos out for you to see with no ads so you can get access to both of these by following the link in my description and the last thing i wanted to mention is something that i was actually quite nervous about putting in this video because i have mentioned it before and i think i've gotten some strong reactions either way about it but honestly i have gone into a lot of thoughts and i completely agree with it so i'm just going to say it i think that the underlying message of putting anything on social media is give me attention and i will say i'm the first person involved in this obviously because this is what i am doing right now um so i'm definitely very very guilty of it but i do genuinely feel that by posting selfies of ourselves or putting ourselves out there or just posting even a picture of the food that we're having whatever we are saying on the surface is that oh i'm having a great time or this was very delicious or this was very fun but what we're saying underneath that i feel is give me attention and even though i'm definitely not above that cry and that need for attention from other people and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that to you know a certain extent it is normal and healthy i just think that promoting it so much and normalizing it so much is perhaps not that healthy and i think it makes one pay a lot more attention inwardly onto ourselves and our attention is not always positive i do think it can give us the illusion that what we are doing or what we are posting has some sort of great importance when it perhaps doesn't and and i do think that when you are social media there is this extra work that you need to do to stay humble and to like yourself for who you are and to be a bit more accepting and kind to other people and i just think that this was something that at the end of the day i just didn't want to keep doing so when it comes to instagram at the end of the day there are some things about it that i do miss i do miss posting stories because it's such a good way to interact with people it's such a good way to have a pulse and it's such a good way to get a huge amount of responses from you guys on things that i perhaps want to do or questions that i want to ask or if i want to do a sit-down q a while i'm painting which i really want to do um i feel like instagram is actually the best place to do this i just wish there was a way that i could just turn off all of my feeds i could turn off my homepage i can turn off my my kind of discovery page and there would just be nothing there i feel like then i would love the platform i know that it's incredibly selfish to not want to interact with anything on instagram but to ask other people to interact with me but i honestly wish that there was a middle ground that i could agree with at this point i don't think that i am deleting my account because i think that that interaction function is very very helpful and something that i might use in the future so i think the way that i'm going to approach social media from now on is not that i'm going to have social media and then take some breaks from it but rather that i'm not going to have social media and i'm going to take some breaks for my breaks when i just want to post a q a or just get some interactions here and there that i might need for this channel so i think that's the way that i'm going to approach it in the future i don't really see myself kind of posting a lot on it or going back to it fully because there's just too much that i dislike about that platform so yes that was everything for this quite rampy video if you made it so far thank you so much for spending this time with me i would love to hear what your approach is to social media or how you can make platforms like instagram actually work if there are ways you can kind of avoid some of these problems i would love to hear them i hope you have a wonderful rest of your day be kind to yourself and others and don't believe everything you think thanks bye

Channel: Elizabeth Filips

Views: 111,109

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Id: BO-2dGuwGC8

Length: 9min 30sec (570 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 29 2021