Why I’m Leaving Social Media.
On the question of the consequential good and bad of social media, at least in the early stages, it was assumed the technology was neutral. In fact, that’s what social media companies had us believe. Facebook, for instance, was just a tool for connection, as is a car for transportation; people could, thus, choose to use it well or with malicious intent. Frankly though, it did connect us more than ever. However, as technology evolved, people began to realise that the initial promise was, indeed, false. Instead, as a former start-up founder and Google engineer, Tristan Harris, notes: “There’s a whole playbook of techniques that get used to get you using the product for as long as possible.”
“...the hot new technologies that emerged in the past decade or so are particularly well suited to foster behavioral addictions, leading people to use them much more than they think is useful or healthy,” writes computer scientist, Cal Newport, in his book Digital Minimalism. “...Compulsive use, in this context,” he states, “ is not a result of character flaw, but instead the realization of a massively profitable plan.” And this, dear friends, is the problem. I felt a long time ago that— while I was attempting to build healthier habits with my social media use, Instagram, TikTok and Twitter in particular—I wrestled with a greater unknown force. “It’s not about usefulness,” declares professor Newport, “it’s about autonomy.” My failures to log off and ‘touch grass’ whenever I so wished, reinforced, more and more, the uncomfortable realisation that I’d lost control.
The year 2023 was my turning point. During Thanksgiving dinner at a friend’s house, I noticed many were glued to their phones. Coming from a country naturally big on community, this scenario was sad. Of course, conversations were had here and there, but then back to the screens. Having recently encountered Netflix’s hit documentary, The Social Dilemma, my mind was ripe with explanations of the scenes unfolding before me. Yet, everyone seemed happy. Generally, I felt miserable. I couldn’t understand why no one seemed to care that we were being manipulated into being glued to our screens. Feelings of anxiety; a need for social approval; and the usual comparison had intensified. Then, I knew a lot was wrong with me and possibly, the engineering of social media.
Fast forward 2025, with more intention, resolve and exposure to literature and content supporting evidence against the modern day algorithm, I deleted Instagram, Twitter and TikTok for good. Well, with Twitter, maybe not for good, but I can confidently state that the hours spent on social media dropped astronomically. As a creative myself, a line from Austin Kleon’s book, Show Your Work, forever echoes in my mind: “Don’t show you lunch or your latte; show your work.” This, to me, reiterated Cal Newport’s solution to our social media addiction. Cal suggests many alternative ways to rid ourselves from the screens: practicing solitude, setting social media hours, complete social media detox, embracing boredom, replacing scrolling with books, going on walks, and deleting social media apps from the phone, among others. At the core of these alternatives, however, is intentional use of social media. This is where those who argue for social media being business models for others find resonance. Because, there are, as already noted, undisputable benefits to all this new technology, social connection included. But, if all were good things, this conversation wouldn’t exist. Understanding, at every particular moment, why we are logged in, becomes of paramount importance. This is probable rationale that eradicates doom scrolling—just existing on the apps because we crave that dopamine spike whereas there are many other things, healthier even, that we could be doing.
In an interview on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, a more mature Tristan Harris, there to warn about the dangers of unregulated AI on humanity, begins with what went wrong with social media. “ So, in 2013,” he says, “I was at Google. I was a lot younger, and I was a design ethicist. I basically realized, when I saw all of my colleagues on the bus scrolling Facebook constantly, that the incentives were the thing that was going to determine the world that we got. The incentive was the race to maximize eyeballs and engagement. Whatever sticky, whatever gets people’s attention, whatever salacious. You run children’s development and self-image through that. You run politics through that. You run media through that. You run information and democracy through that.” Once one understands, as Harris says, that all this is done with the goal of market dominance, the need to own as much of the global psychology of humanity, it’s difficult not to be alarmed.
Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner make clear in their book, Think Like a Freak, that human behavior is driven by incentives. Understand incentives and the underlying system becomes visible. From this lens, we also understand how autocrats get and keep political power, as illustrated by the authors(Alastair Smith and Bruce Bueno de Mesquita) of The Dictators’ Handbook. “Politics,” they write, “like all of life, is about individuals, each motivated to do what is good for them, not what is good for others.” By looking at social media’s profits and incentives, as is now becoming of AI, too, the goal remains as the need to maximise one’s attention given to the apps. “And if you affect attention…,” emphasizes Harris on What Now? with Trevor Noah, “you affect where all of humanity’s choices arise from. And what is better for winning the ‘attention economy’? “...a more addicted, outraged, polarized, narcissistic, validation seeking, breakdown of truth, breakdown of democracy’s trust and society. All of these things, unfortunately, are direct consequences of where the incentives in social media place us.”
You’re likely to see an Instagram story from me, a retweet, a TikTok like, or whatever new ways of keeping us feeling like we’re more engaged and better off on these platforms than our immediate realities. Don’t call me out for a false preacher, the do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do type of guy. I’m human, and, like all of us, sometimes, vain. But, in all this, I found more reason to be off the apps. And as the years progress, I hope to be off completely and find better ways to exist. Because, ultimately, it’s not only a fight for autonomy against the tech giants. It is what Cal Newport points to in Digital Minimalism, the question tackled by Aristotle in Nicomachean Ethics: How does one live a good life?
In the context of social media and AI, where attention is psychologically manipulated for profit, where regulation is left to the level of the self, how, then, does one really live a good life?
Note: For regular readers of this publication, thank you for your support. If you were enjoying any of these musings, sorry I left. I hope I’m back. But, assuming for this you care, I’ve been writing, because, as the streets say: the grind never stops.
I never got to Thank you all for my first milestone—a 100 subscribers. Where it was once a void, a small community has formed. To many more milestones.
For the aspiring writer, like me still, don’t fear the page and sharing your thoughts. The writing can(will) always get better, we just have to keep at it.
As always, Aluta Continua, beautifully so.