When I tell people I’m not on social media, they invariably react with a mix of incredulity and pity. It’s as if I’ve confessed to recording TV shows on a VHS whilst wearing an apron and listening to David Hasselhoff’s ‘Greatest Hit’.
“But…how do you stay in touch?” asked my friend, Benji, the other day.
I looked up from my quinoa salad and paused. “Uhm, the same way I’m keeping in touch with you now?”
Benji sighed. “No, with strangers I mean.”
What perplexes people – my friends, especially ̶ is that I used to be so active on Instagram. Every moment of my day was an opportunity to post something. Shadows falling on my sofa. Snap! An ice-cream cone. Snap! Any random dog. Snap! A bowl of noodles at Crystal Jade. Snap – with portrait mode! Post.
And then I’d spend the next few hours obsessively checking my phone for updates on what Oprah, Heidi Klum, and a complete stranger in rural Iowa who raised adorable prize pigs were up to. I could be in the middle of a downward dog, but I’d get up to check a ’Like’ or ‘Comment’ notification. Instagram was the first thing I checked when I woke up, and the last thing before sleep.
But like any relationship, the obsession started to change. Little irritations crept in. For starters, I found myself unable to read anything longer than a paragraph. Repetitive reels of yoga influencers doing backbends began to depress me, seeing as I could barely perform a forward fold. And after a while, posts of yet another packed bag and airplane boarding ticket became triggering.
So…one day, I just quit. Cold turkey. I closed down Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok, and deleted the apps off my phone. A month later, I switched off WhatsApp because I didn’t want Mark Zuckerberg to get any richer than he already was/is.
That was three years ago and to everyone’s surprise, I’m still me. There are some grumbles from friends and family ̶ “ Why are you sending me text messages?!” – but the world hasn’t stopped turning. I haven’t been deported from Singapore. I’ve not been committed to a psychiatric ward. Sure, there have been some changes to my life. Nothing particularly earth-shattering, but basically, I’ve found that I now have more time. Specifically…
1. MAKE TIME TO DO SOMETHING ELSE
Out of curiosity, once, when I was in the grips of my obsession with Instagram, I asked my friend Jen how many hours a day she spent on it. She pursed her lips. “Not very long. I’m very disciplined. Not like you. An hour in the morning, an hour in the evening. That’s it.” I did my maths and discovered that this translated to 730 hours a year, or a month. And Jen was right, I spent more time than she did on social media when I could have been discovering the cure for cancer ̶ or, at the very least, learning how to tap dance. So there’s that.
2. MORE TIME TO SOCIALISE
As in actually seeing people IRL. I find it takes real effort to arrange to meet up with someone, but there’s something to be said for sitting across an old friend, laughing and bonding over a Pad Thai, as opposed to liking a reel they posted of a long immigration line in Bangkok airport and calling it a day for ‘staying in touch’.
3. MORE TIME FOR REALITY
For a while, I dreamt of becoming an influencer. Or being discovered. For what exactly I was never too clear, but I had vague images of being pursued by paparazzi and being interviewed by Oprah. Eventually, I realised that for every Justin Bieber or Troye Sivan who’s discovered on social media, there are a bazillion other nonentities like me who can post every day of their lives and still not become famous or rich. In other words, for most of us, the odds of you landing a once-in-a-lifetime job dog-sitting for Taylor Swift off the back of your posts of home-made sourdough aren’t great.
4. MORE TIME TO READ
Not habitually reading short social media captions has somehow re-hardwired my brain with the result that I’m back to my great love of reading long-form novels.
5. MORE TIME FOR WHAT’S IMPORTANT
Now, don’t start trolling me. I’m not saying that what you’re posting isn’t important. (But really? No one cares.) It’s just that from a safe distance of three years, I realise that most of the things I was obsessing about on social media were mostly meaningless. Why, I now wonder, did I ever allow a stranger’s post of their back-bend make me feel bad about myself, like I was an underachiever?
6. MORE TIME TO BE BETTER
A friend asked me, “But how do you get work? How do people know about what you do, or what you’re up to?” Well, for me, there’s always LinkedIn, which I don’t really consider social media in the same way Twitter or TikTok are. And anyway, as the comedian Steve Martin once said, “Be so good you can’t be ignored.” So, there’s also that.