On Leaving Social Media ... For Good

Why I am stepping away after 17 years of largely uninterrupted usage.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

I got my first request to join Facebook from my friend Carrie back in 2007, and I got it via a DM on Skype, which is what the cool kids were using for instant messaging back in those dark days. I wasn’t that interested at first, knowing that I had tried my hand briefly at MySpace and had found it a clunky and unfulfilling experience, and so I had little to no desire to launch myself into what essentially seemed like a place for low res photo sharing and unsolicited friend poking. Look it up, Facebook poking, it was a thing. But, peer pressure and curiosity of the feline fatality inducing extent led me to have a look, and I have been a fairly consistent - though absolutely unremarkable - presence on multiple social media platforms ever since.

But now, I am leaving them all, for good, and I use that word “good” as both a delineation of time and a descriptor of hopeful positive outcomes. It is overdue, to be honest. I should have done this a long time ago.

While I know I could easily have just left quietly without drawing any attention to it at all, and while I know that my footprint or “influence” is so minuscule that my absence would make no difference at all, I found it helpful to capture my thoughts in order to better understand my own disquiet, and to test my own logic and thinking around it. I make no claims that this is true for everyone. I don’t deny that I am particularly prone to some of these downsides due to my own weaknesses, and don’t suppose for a moment that these haunt anyone else.

What follows then, are some of the reasons that I decided to shut it all down … for my own good. I am not making universal claims of morality or flourishing for any of you. If you are interested, you can find some significantly more compelling and beautiful reasoning for a similar decision here.

If, however, you are someone who has enjoyed keeping up with the Lester’s life through my social presence, then please feel free to subscribe to regular updates at the link below this article.

This substack will be my primary place for updates on life, ministry, and all the other things. It will also hopefully be the place for some serialized fiction, poetry, and other goodies along the way.

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10 Reasons I Am Leaving Social Media … For Good.

1. It promised meaningful human connection and community and it can no longer deliver on that promise, and I don’t think it is even trying any more. News feeds used to be full of random life updates from friends, but the way that feeds get curated now (more on that in point 5 below) means that most of the content that gets profiled is from creators that I have little to no desire or ability to interact with. If you felt connected with me through socials and don’t want to lose touch, please send me a message and I will gladly give you my contact details. That way we can actually talk to each other, instead of silently stalking each other’s lives.

2. It confuses my creaturely limitations, making me believe that I can actually know that much information, about that many people, in such a short space of time. It’s the illusion of omnipresence and omniscience that leaves one reeling. We simply don’t have the ability to rightly handle that much information (or that many people) at once.

3. It tempts me to prioritize strangers in the abstract “out there” over loved ones in the reality in front of me. This is a me issue and not a platform issue, but I hate that I haven’t done this better. When I think of all of the times when I could have been engaging in conversation with Sue when I rather chose to scroll content from strangers while sitting next to Sue, I cringe. What a waste.

4. I am wearied by the reality warp, where the gap between what people post and what is actually happening in their lives is tragic and dehumanizing. My vocation gives me the privileged position of front row seats to the difficult realities of many people’s lives. I don’t take that lightly. But when I see those same people’s feeds full of an apparent life free from those pain points, then I get deeply discouraged. The gap between real life and people’s feeds couldn’t be more stark, and I am fatigued by the maintenance of that gap.

5. The algorithm has become unbearable, and I want to limit the extent to which my thinking is driven by algorithmically determined trajectories. Do you remember when your Facebook and Insta timeline was simply all that your friends had posted in the order that they had posted it? No curation, no promotion, no ads, and no ability for an algorithm to tell you what you can see. I am astonished at how narrow the algorithm has become on Insta and YouTube especially. A couple of clicks on an account or a video and you can pretty accurately predict what you will be seeing for the next couple of weeks. It is making us all dumber.

6. It plays to the worst of my own warped desires and insecurities, namely ambition and covetousness. I know that there are many who don’t struggle here, but I do. Socials serve as an opportunity to look over your neighbor’s wall, which for me has led to an unhealthy amount of FOMO, covetousness, comparison, and desire for more profile. I don’t like any of those things in my life and character and so don’t want to feed them any longer.

7. I want time back to do creative things. If I say that I spent about 30 minutes a day scrolling passively, and that is probably about right, and then I ask what would happen if I turned that time into skill development of some sort, I am left to conclude that social media is a massive waste of time in my life. My hope is to take that lost time back and to put it towards learning to play the piano, or reading reading Russian novels, or writing poetry.

8. I have become persuaded that the whole things is largely spiritually deformative (thanks to my friend Justin for this insight.) I no longer view social media as neutral in my walk with Christ. I think it makes me less like Jesus, all the while promising that it would deliver me content to accomplish the opposite. I want to be formed and conformed into the image of Christ, and socials make that harder, and not easier.

9. I have increasing concerns about putting that much data online. Yeah. No brainer. Should have concerned me way earlier.

10. It makes me less happy and less healthy. The data that is beginning to emerge on the correlation of socials arriving on smart phones and the fierce spikes we are seeing in depression, anxiety, and self harm are astonishing. There is part of me that wonders if this will be our generation’s cigarettes, where the data will reveal that we were all engaging in something really, really unhealthy, and where our willingness to do so will seem insane to the generation to come.

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That’s it, for now. All my accounts will be deactivated and deleted on the 1st of June, 2024. I am sure that my instinct to pick up my phone for a mindless scroll will remain for a while, but once it passes, I hope to pour that effort and energy into the pursuit of actual people, using that same device to make that long overdue call.