Giving up social media

Would you benefit from a digital detox? Contributing editor Jonathan Cowie reflects on six months of being completely social media free.

Google ‘no social media’ and the first result that comes up is a Vice article: ‘Why are people with no social media so hot?’.

What better reason than that to have a digital detox in 2023?

I quit Twitter and Facebook about five years ago and early last summer I decided to come off Instagram too – although not for the reason above! Six months on I thought I would reflect on the experience.

Going cold turkey

Social media is often talked about in the language of addiction: we “give up” or “come off ” the platforms.

For the first few weeks after going cold turkey and deactivating my Instagram account I did have an itch to reconnect; I found myself endlessly scrolling through my emails as I would have scrolled through my Instagram feed. But that soon subsided.

My anxiety levels are now lower and my general sense of wellbeing is higher. As well as time spent scrolling I also felt I should be posting and that would make me feel anxious.

I recognise that social media has upsides as well as down-sides. Feeling part of a community, even a digital community, has benefits in terms of connection with other people. Experiences and real-life meet-ups can spring from those online connections.

No more digital dramas

But after six months of no social media I am now happily disconnected from the online world. Social media spats and dramas pass me by. I don’t spend hours making reels to feed an algorithm.

Sometimes I feel as though I am missing out, but if I have to log on for work then I am soon reminded how addictive social media is, how it fills our heads with noise and steals our time by keeping us scrolling.

I would rather read a book, go for a swim or look out the window.

I recently started reading Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman. 4,000 weeks is the average human lifespan; when expressed in weeks it sounds brutally short.

Time well spent

And as I hit middle age and the illnesses of friends and family serve as a memento mori, it is a reminder that you have a finite time on this earth to live a meaningful life. After a bit of Googling and back-of-a-fag-packet maths I worked out that of those 4,000 weeks the average person spends 347 weeks of their life engaging with social media.

That’s 347 weeks I would rather spend doing something else.

There are downsides to having no social media of course. I feel disconnected to some friends, but I have developed deeper relationships with others as we have connected more in real life.

It may be that social media would be beneficial professionally (but that is another question).

In the end, trying to live in the moment rather than capturing it to post on social media is for me a more meaningful existence.

This article is from the January 2023 issue of Outdoor Swimmer. Click here to subscribe to the magazine.