Deleting social media can be challenging. However, after many years addicted to the platform, I finally decided to delete most of them from my phone.
I still have a professional profile on some networks, where I participate in groups related to the companies I work for, but other than that, no personal use.
Once I deleted most of my social media, I saw numerous benefits that I hadn’t realized before, and today I’m here to talk a little about it.
DISCLAIMER: This was a text I wrote years ago for my professional blog. I was going to delete it, but I thought the content was good and moved it to my personal blog. Keep in mind that this text has a little less literary value and is more focused on “content”.
Why Delete Social Media?
See why you should delete some of the main social media:
1. Why Delete Instagram?
People only show the life they want on Instagram, besides constantly comparing themselves to unrealistic expectations. Therefore, deleting Instagram can be a way to preserve your privacy and mental health, avoiding social comparison and the pursuit of a fake life.
2. Why Delete Twitter?
Twitter is a place with many political discussions, toxic arguments, and misinformation. Therefore, deleting Twitter can be motivated by issues such as information overload, dissemination of fake news, and exposure to hate speech.
3. Why Delete TikTok?
TikTok is full of addictive videos that make you want to stay glued to it all day long. I would say it’s the most addictive social network. Stay away at all costs!
4. Why Delete Facebook?
Deleting Facebook can be motivated by issues related to political discussions, information overload, and preserving privacy. It is a network with many trivial discussions and negativity.
7 Reasons to Delete Social Media
See the main reasons I’ve listed for deleting social media.
1. Friendships on social media aren’t real
Facebook changed our concept of friendship from something active to something passive.
Instead of cultivating friendships through conversations and closeness, always helping as we can, just adding someone to consider ourselves friends.
We don’t need to do anything: with the press of a few buttons, making a dozen friendships a day, and we start receiving updates in heaps.
Of all your friends on Facebook, do you really know how 10% of them are? What’s going on in their lives? Most likely, you only see the best of their lives, which they make a point of sharing on social media.
This generates a bunch of relationships, but with no depth at all. However, humanity has always been based on small and strong relationships.
If that’s the case, you can take one of the measures like deleting those people you don’t care about.
2. You waste a lot of time
Something easy to notice in the first few days is the gain of free time when getting rid of my old account.
Social media give us a great flow of information and we end up losing hours and hours scrolling through the timeline.
For example: I imposed a limit of 10 minutes daily on the social network, but I found myself bypassing this imposition, even with the help of applications, to finish reading some interesting text.
In my case, I needed a drastic measure and deactivation was my solution. Therefore, if you have a goal, study topic, or venture in mind, continuous use of social media can ruin your productivity.
3. You become more extremist on social media
Indeed: we cannot deny that there are many people and pages with very interesting content on the platform.
However, we have to be careful with reading texts on social media because the positions are always very inflamed and we often end up taking sides, becoming aggressive with any opposing opinion.
Just remember the confusion that always happens during elections: family fights, broken friendships, and even problems at work.
Does this mean we should close ourselves off to these discussions? Not at all.
However, instead of adopting the opinion of our favorite page or intellectual guru, why not try to address the issue in the best possible way: slowly, learning gradually until we can really have a concrete view of the subject?
I’ll ask you a question, be honest: when you hear about some news, do you try to learn about the subject or do you read what your favorite page said about it?
Well, we all know that the second option is the preference of 99.99% of people, and we have to avoid this kind of behavior, which is widely encouraged today.
4. We think we are smarter than we really are
We all have to have an opinion on everything, and many times the most sensible thing to do is to admit: “I don’t know enough, I’ll seek to study.”
Those who like to read about politics, economics, ideologies, etc., end up becoming professional debaters, displaying the flag of opinion A, B, or C on their chest and fighting against everything and everyone who goes against their thinking.
Indeed: the worst of all is that on social media we show our most extreme and arrogant side: we end up seeing everything with a highly biased view, where everything comes down to right against left, misogynist against feminist, and so on.
However, in real life, people are very different: if you give an opinion to someone and they disagree, they’re hardly going to curse you to your face.
Therefore, what we see of people on social media are only their most extreme and politicized parts.
In other words, we end up being wary of many acquaintances when in fact their political opinions are little or nothing relevant in many cases of our lives.
Thus, discussions on social media make it seem like we are in an endless war, that we are bastions of truth.
We engage in an endless battle that leads nowhere. That’s why I preferred to disconnect from all of that and try to see people for who they are.
5. Information overload
They say that being informed is important, but too much information can leave us confused and anxious – and social media do a lot of that. Information overload is real.
We are bombarded with information on all subjects that I couldn’t focus on learning one thing properly.
Contrary to what is said nowadays, doing 30 things at once and leaving everything unfinished is not a good thing, it’s better to focus on the main ones.
And we can’t do that with news of violence, protests, and the like popping up in our eyes. However, some may argue that by deactivating our Facebook, we are left without an important source of information and we may become more ignorant.
Never before have we had access to this amount of information, and yet we have always had very intelligent people in all ages.
Indeed: many times I saw valuable information about philosophy, education, science, economics, only to then leave it aside and never look for it again.
Finally, we end up distancing ourselves from our areas of interest and superficially reading a lot of texts that will serve us little. News appearing all the time ends up increasing our dispersion.
6. You lose your privacy
Have you ever talked to a friend about a certain subject and, five minutes later, an advertisement related to what you said appeared?
Social media track what we talk about, what we say, and our interests on the internet. With WhatsApp and Messenger, they have access to all your most private conversations, whether by audio or in writing.
With Instagram, they have access to your photos and details about the places you go, what you like, and more.
Finally, with Facebook, they know your network of acquaintances and what you think about various subjects. Imagine if they want to abuse that power?
7. You don’t need social media
Have you ever wondered how Instagram or Facebook entered your life so much that you’re afraid of losing your profile?
After one or two weeks, many people end up not missing the use of social media and find other hobbies more useful.
Although, on social media, you have distant relatives, acquaintances, people we’ve seen in person once or twice… We don’t care so much about them.
Think about it: how many people on your Facebook do you really care about? Is it worth keeping in touch with so many random people? Why don’t you take a test? You can deactivate Facebook by going to settings.
After a few weeks, you’ll notice that you’re less anxious and spend less time on the internet.