Digital Minimalism

14 Jul 2023

I want to start by saying that this isn’t against anyone who uses social media. Everyone is different and your experience using it might not be the same as mine and that's great.

I deleted all of my social media on December 31, 2022

On the night of New Year, I was sitting in my room and I was watching YouTube like every other night and I was recommended a video by Jack Denmo called ‘Monk Mode 2023”

As I watched the video and a lot of his other content, the gears started turning in my head and I realized that I was wasting too much of my time on social media.

Denmo convinced me that I should try the dopamine detox and one of the first things I should do is stop being a little cockroach and get off social media.

I think part of the reason this new idea resonated with me was that I had already been feeling like I needed change in my life but I wasn’t sure what it was until this point.

He explained that if I mindlessly consume content all day I won't make any progress towards my actual goals.

Right then and there, I deleted TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, and Twitter. So I pretty much quit the 4 big social media platforms immediately without a second thought.

I already didn’t use Snapchat and most of the other humans I spoke to back then I only had on Snapchat, so I decided to keep it.

I’m known by my friends to be bad at answering messages and snaps because I simply just don’t like the app. In the last 7 months, I’ve opened Snapchat less than 6 times.

I still use YouTube (my channel ) but I feel like YouTube is different than the other platforms because of its long-form content structure.

During this time, I’ve been mainly using it for educational content like self-improvement and business. However, as time went on, I’ve been using YouTube less and less and doing more and more to change my life.

Now that I’ve explained what I used to use and what I’ve been doing, I want to go over some pros and cons of deleting social media.

Cons:

1: You have no idea what's going on in the outside world...

It's practically every day that people around me are talking about certain subjects and I have no idea what they mean like at all.

For example, at the time this video is being recorded, everyone is talking about this whole submarine Titanic thing, from what I’ve heard is that these very wealthy people went in some kind of submersible to go see the remains of the Titanic and unfortunately the vehicle imploded and there were no survivors.

Another example is this grimace trend thing.

I keep hearing people say the grimace trend and I still don’t fully understand what it is.

I guess McDonald’s has a grimace shake and people make skits where they drink the shake and grimace haunts them? I'm not sure lol.

I could easily look these things up myself, but I feel like if I did that then it would defeat the purpose of deleting social media in the first place because I was trying to avoid seeing things that I felt brought me no value.

2: People trying to share posts with you

This one was a little annoying at the start because there were people like my friends and acquaintances who would send me posts or videos from social media.

Especially from the app I was trying to avoid the most...Tik Tok.

It got to the point where people would wonder why I was not watching the videos they sent and I would have to explain myself every time.

I was too committed to this to look at even one post or video.

I had to kind of ease into this one with the people who are closest to me because some of these people were literally sending me 10-15 tik-toks a day and I would just completely ignore them.

As time went on it didn't happen as often and people started to get the memo that I didn't use social media anymore.

3: Losing friends

This one is tough because you have to take a look at who your friends from social media and decide whether you are going to keep in contact with them.

Honestly, for me, it wasn’t too much of a challenge because I had recently graduated high school.

Pretty much immediately, you start to get a good grasp of who is going to stay in your life and who isn’t so when I left I already had the number of people that I liked.

To add to my last point, this isn’t losing friends but it's a weird dynamic at the start when you don’t know how some of the people you are acquainted with are doing.

Especially when you're chronically online and in everyone else's business all the time for no reason.

You start to forget that some people even exist.

This also has the adverse effect but to me, it’s a pro.

Pros:

So to build on the last point I made about the cons, the first pro is that people don’t know what I’m up to, and it's pretty nice.

I wasn’t the type of person who would post that much on social media anyway. I was more of a spectator, but when I did post I would get a decent amount of viewership and response from people that had no business seeing the parts of my life I would share.

It kinda makes me feel “mysterious” in a way because nobody has any idea about the things I’m doing, so one day if I were to get back on social media(which I plan to), people would see an entirely different person.

It’s a little strange but it makes me a little excited that I can show off my progress one day.

2:Reduced Stress/Self Reflection:

This is one of the biggest reasons why people hop on the social media detox.

I don't have any research to back up what I'm about to say next so we are now entering the bro-science zone.

Take what I'm saying here with a grain of salt.

The way that I kinda picture it, most people have simple brains and don’t realize that this social media thing is unlike anything the world has ever seen before.

Even 50-60 years ago there wasn't a massive amount of people who were world famous.

You weren’t able to see and speak to people from every part of the world within a few seconds like we are now.

Meaning that those people back then were only used to seeing people in their town or city and only heard about the news from said city.

They weren’t in other people's business all the time and were more concerned with real-life things like taking care of their family.

So when you let people see 100s of millions and even billions of other people online, they start to compare.

The reason why I’m saying all this is because now…

We compare ourselves with other people based on looks, status, and success and we start to get jealous and self-conscious.

I believe that it is unhealthy for our brains to see so many other people who we think are better than us.

Not all exposure to different types of people is bad; because without seeing other people who are better than us, we'll become completely complacent. You need to have a balance.

Not having so many other people in your face who are doing better or worse than you gives you time to think about yourself for a change and so some reflection on who you are and what kind of person you want to become without outside comparison.

Or at least that's what I got out of it.

3: Being more productive

Probably the best pro to quitting social media is that you’re more productive(Well hopefully, at least...).

Since quitting, I’ve learned to fill my time with more productive things like learning, reading books, spending time with family, going to the gym, learning to cook, and probably the most important one of them all, sleeping.

Every teenager with a smartphone knows what I mean by this one.

We all stayed up till 4 AM scrolling on Instagram or TikTok and regretted it the next day only to do the same thing again the following night.

Not having this problem anymore was one of the biggest benefits for me and it helped me realize the value of a good night's sleep.

Did you know that drowsy driving is responsible for an estimated 6,000 fatal crashes in the US each year, while drunk driving is responsible for around 10,000 deaths per year?

Isn’t that insane…that driving while being sleepy has caused 6/10ths the amount of deaths caused by drunk driving each year?

Imagine what being sleepy does to your productivity. Now, this is not as extreme as fatal car accidents, but I add this to open your eyes to the fact that being sleepy can seriously affect your day-to-day functions and you might not even notice how it negatively affects you because if that's your baseline.

When you don’t have anything to do on your phone at night, it eliminates your ability to waste time on it.

There were nights when my muscle memory would reach for my phone before going to sleep and I'd find nothing to do, so I'd do what I was supposed to do at night….REST.

4: Living in the moment

This is one that a lot of people need to hear because I see too many people who are on their phones out in public when they are with their friends and family.

NOBODY CARES who you are with at this moment or what you’re doing….nobody.

There is no need to take a picture of your food at a restaurant or snap that random person's back while you are at the mall with your mom.

I’m just gonna scroll right past that mid food and that person isn’t gonna open your snap right away anyways.

You’re not important bro.

Since deleting social media, I’ve been more at the moment in every situation and people have noticed it.

Older people have said things like “Do you even have a phone” to me?

Trust me, everything is better when you just reel in the things that are happening around you without taking pictures. That picture will mean nothing compared to the experience itself, but you’ll miss that experience if you’re too busy taking pictures to keep your snap-streak.

Final thoughts:

So far as of July 2023, I’ve been pretty happy with my decision to take a break from social media and have no regrets whatsoever.

I don’t think that I would have started my YouTube channel, started this blog, and done many other things if I still had social media dragging me down.

I plan to do an update once I’m off social media for a year to see if anything has changed. I might decide to go back onto it for business reasons, but I’m not entirely sure yet. (spoiler I am)

I would recommend that everyone tries the social media detox even for a small amount of time just to see if it can bring any benefits to your own life as it did mine.

What to lose? Give it a week and see if you get any new ideas!

Again, this is just my experience with social media and not a shot at anyone who still uses them.

There are plenty of reasons to use social media and many people use social media to build their brands and spread their messages and I admire that.

If you made it this far, I hope that I have opened your eyes to some new ideas in this video and thank you for reading my very first newsletter.

I hope you have a great rest of your day and see you soon.

-Abraham