I find myself becoming more and more dissatisfied with social media, as I'm sure many people are. We all know how it works at this point; social medias want us to stay scrolling as long as possible, in order to show us as many advertisements as possible. As a result, anything that draws your attention in will be shown to you, if the algorithm is good at its job. It doesn't matter if the posts you see make you feel good or bad; whatever works, works. These algorithms are not there to make you happy, it was not developed with your benefit in mind, only the investors' and CEOs'. Old news. We all know this. And yet we keep scrolling anyway, either because it feels like it doesn't negatively effect us, or we find it increasingly difficult to pull ourselves away.
There's probably a trillion different thinkpieces and video essays you could watch that talks about all of this. I've read and watched a couple here and there. I'm thankful for them, because they make me feel spiteful enough to log out of my socials for periods of time. I tried logging into Tumblr today after about a week or so of not opening it, and found myself doomscrolling for much longer than I wanted to be scrolling. So I deleted the app off my phone again.
Besides the doomscrolling, I find that social media often leaves me feeling lonelier than I do when I stay off of it. I don't feel very comfortable speaking to people on public accounts because I'm paranoid. I barely feel comfortable interacting on private accounts, for the same reason. I don't feel comfortable reaching out to people to trade contact information, because of the aforementioned paranoia, and my social anxiety. So I get frustrated on social media, because all I do is doomscroll, feel private anger, and pass on opportunities for social interaction out of fear. If I'm going to be alone, I'd rather spend it doing things like job searching, preparing for university, reading, or doing something creative, instead of wasting my damn time filling my head with shit that does nothing but make me feel stressed or lonely.
(Sometimes Neocities feels like a social media to me, which I hate. That's why I've been gone for so long and turned off my site profile, if you were wondering.)
Clearly I have a vendetta against social media. My life has largely been online for many years (I imagine that, if anyone is reading this, you can relate to that). I don't regret it or anything, and I don't really fault it for my social phobia and difficulty going outside. I would blame gender dysphoria, OCD, and COVID quarantine for that. In fact, in a lot of ways I feel grateful for my time on social media because of all the ways it has helped me, whether through social interaction, enabling self-discovery, or, yeah, learning about politics and the world around me. But it would also be silly to act like social media hasn't contributed to my issues. Just because social media has done me good, doesn't mean it hasn't done me bad. And it just keeps getting worse. There is less and less good in it to be found for me. I am ready to move on from it; perhaps not entirely, perhaps not forever, but certainly for at least some time. I'll probably continue to log into some socials every once in a while when I feel comfortable and have the downtime, but for the most part I want to stay off because I fucking hate them. It's been fairly easy so far, since every time I try logging back in I feel like an animal raising its hackles. Not that it's meant to be a test of willpower or anything like that.
My therapist had me take some questionnaires a few months back. One of them was the Social Avoidance and Distress Scale (SADS). The higher the score, the more avoidance and distress is experienced. She told me I scored in the 91st percentile. I was already aware of my social anxiety, but knowing that I scored so high on the SADS puts into perspective how bad it is. I think that at this point, social media has become something I use to feel like I'm being somehow social. But the reality is, other than with my partner and sometimes family, I do not socialize. I may as well "own up to it" and spend my time doing the productive things I listed, or actually going out places to socialize. Part of me worries that cutting myself off from social media will only serve to worsen my social anxiety by removing yet another social outlet, but I also somehow doubt it because of everything I've written out here.
I guess we will see how it goes.