Took a break from socials, so here I am

If you asked me a month ago why I use social media, I could have given you dozens of reasons: to stay up-to-date with my friends and family who live far way, to keep up with popular culture and news, or because I find online debate and discussion interesting.

These are all noble and somewhat true justifications, but none are completely honest. The real reason? I can’t help it.

I am an algorithm’s dream. I have had Facebook since I was 11, Instagram since I was 13, and dabbled in TikTok at 20. I simply love content. I write and edit for work, so I suppose it’s not a bad thing. I devour podcasts, books, news, Instagram celebrity pages, all of it.

But the algorithm has worked me out. If it feeds me content, I will want more of it, even when it annoys me, even when it stops entertaining me, even when I am not enjoying it anymore. A stronger person may be able to put the phone down at that point. I fear I am not that person.

When Australia banned under 16s from using social media late last year, I joked to my friends that I wish they would ban the over 16s as well. Ban me. Get me out of here.

Well, I am a grown up. I can ban myself, so I did … for 2 weeks. I thought the first week would be the hardest. It wasn’t. I loved it.

Unexpected bonuses of not being able to scroll on your phone:

• Knowing all of the thoughts in your brain belong to you and were not highjacked by a random person rage baiting you

• New York Times games

• Newsletters (yes, newsletters are so back)

• Telling everybody that you are taking a break from social media and waiting for the gasps and applause (still waiting)

• Watching the new Bridgeton series at a snail pace without the internet immediately spoiling the plot.

Then it got hard.

Unexpected disappointments of not being able to scroll on your phone:

• Queues

• Lack of brain rot time after work

• Other people still scroll in your presence and you have no right to be annoyed at them

• Doing cool things and not being able to immediately prove it

• Big pop culture moments happen and you find out 4 days later.

  
  

My job still required me to check their social media every day, so to avoid accidentally breaking the challenge with a scroll, I used Safari on my phone. This left me vulnerable to whatever the first post that appeared in my feed was.

*Gasp* Molly-Mae is having another baby?! How did I not know this? How did no one tell me? Maybe I can just do a stalk on Safari quickly to bring myself up to date and look at nothing else?

Then I got over it.

If it’s not disturbingly obvious by now, my relationship with social media is ah, not so good – but I still don’t plan to quit altogether.

When I hit 14 days of my break, I re-downloaded Instagram because it was a Sunday and I believed I had earned a scroll, only to find … not much of interest. A few Valentines pictures, a lot of posts from the official account of Laneway, a lot of news (which I easily accessed elsewhere,) but not much at all from my friends and family. I hadn’t missed anything. In fact, I got bored, closed the app and moved to my favourite activity I took up during my break: Wordle.

I had suspicions before, but this confirmed for me that Instagram is really, um, not that enjoyable anymore. As the influencing economy grows, ordinary people post less and less, so the space is filled with ads (at least my algorithm is.) The only thing that seems to have kept me scrolling was habit and the occasional well-placed reel. Without realising it my phone became a place where I passively observed the lives of strangers, rather than one where I share my own life with my own social circle.

Despite this, I will certainly fall down the algorithm rabbit hole again. I have already extended a quick 10-minute scroll into 30 minutes of brain rot to watch snippets of the Bridgeton press tour.

I hear that Shrek is a cautionary tale now, rather than a fairy tale, about how choosing the wrong man will make an ogre out of you. I missed this one, but I’m sure the next absurd and random hot take might just derail my thoughts for a whole week.

I look forward to it because it’s fun and silly, and because I have finally proven to myself in the most absurd way that I can simply turn it off when it stops being so.