Juan Alberto López Cavallotti

Over three months ago, I decided to quit using social media. The pressure was building up for me to find a job, and Meta had just rejected me without any explanation. Looking back, had I been offered a job in Meta, this post would be a complete hypocrisy from me. 

During those three months, I experienced many benefits that I will outline today, along with the issues that social media has caused me. So, buckle up. I will bring you on an exciting journey.

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

I began thinking about social media after reading Jonathan Haidt’s excellent book “The Anxious Generation.” In the book, Haidt analyzes social media apps by their distinct features: posts, stories, reels, chat, etc.

He argues that friends’ posts and stories are good features because they encourage people to engage in storytelling, a creative activity and an important part of human life. They become problematic when users measure their success from number of likes and reactions, and begin conditioning their life to stir this metric. Showing an increasingly “happy” but fake reality.

Watching content produced by your close friends is relatively harmless. Still, it becomes bad when, instead, what you are presented with is curated by a sophisticated AI algorithm designed to catch your attention and sell you stuff.

Things get ugly when content creators begin radicalizing their ideas to be highlighted by the algorithm, as with features like Reels, so I will start by picking on Reels.

Reels Radicalized Me

At the time, I was working on healing my past relationship issues, picking a good partner, learning effective communication, and so forth. I found the content very engaging, but the algorithm slowly began presenting me with dating coaches, especially dating coaches for men whose ideas were increasingly radical.

Let’s reason about it: as a content creator, how do you attract viewers toward you? Simple, exaggerate a bit over the last creator. That’s an idea explored also by Jonathan Haidt.

In my case, I began blaming women’s “evil behaviors,” and for a hot minute, I even hated women. And it wasn’t until a guy friend called me misogynist that I realized how much I had been manipulated.

Reels Isolated Me

As an unemployed entrepreneur wannabe, I had plenty of time and flexibility to organize it as I pleased. At some point, my only interactions with people for long periods were exchanging reels as DMs and liking them.

I realized that all that time, I neglected my most important connections in life: my family and close friends. Instead of getting updates from them or checking in on how they were doing, I simply exchanged curated content.

This curated content also distances me from those who think differently.

Some say that the prevalence of TV during the 1980s impacted trust between neighbors, which, in turn, led to parents being overprotective of their children around other adults. I would argue that having this “TV” hooked up to our brains 24/7 makes it difficult to trust anyone because now we simply don’t have the time to interact. We watch it on the supermarket line, on the bus, before bed, and sometimes during traffic lights. When are we supposed to interact with whoever is close and build trust?

Reels Impaired My Creativity and Inner Dialog

I have been building my app, WhippedUp, for the last few years. It slowly evolved from a simple cooking tool to a social recipe book. I can’t stress how hard it was to reason about it and why users wouldn’t use it. I was either working on it or watching curated content. How was I supposed to stop and think?

They say that to be creative, you have to be bored. Boredom fosters creativity, and that’s how ancient philosophers like the Stoics managed to draw incredibly profound conclusions about human life that scientific research is starting to confirm.

Also, since I didn’t allow myself time to be bored, I wouldn’t have profound conversations with myself too often. Maybe only during therapy hours and trips to nature. After I left social media, I began to talk much more with myself and gain deeper insights into my inner world.

Social Media Made Me Focus on the Wrong People

I have been posting photos of my food for many years to force myself to cook more. This hack worked at one expense: I spent the entire day focused on how many views and who saw and reacted to my posts rather than moving on with my life, further distracting me from what was important in my physical life. Who I was cooking for then, them or me?

I was living to please my audience instead of building meaningful connections with anyone in particular. 

Haidt argues that this hedonic consumption of people’s lives renders many connections with little depth. As humans, we form society and groups to collaborate; we need to trust one another. It is crucial to spend quality time with a few hand-picked individuals instead of everyone you have met, maybe even once. Otherwise, how can we be there for each other?

Finally, I also relied on these updates I posted as a replacement for calling my friends and family. You don’t know what I’m up to? Better stick to the program. Good luck. As I left social media, it was crystal-clear to me who I wanted to share my life with and who I didn’t. I love you all though!

Over-sharing my Internal World With Everyone Caused Misinterpretations

If I posted a photo, a lyric, a quote from a book, or anything else, there was always one who thought I was doing it for or to them.

I can’t count the tantrums and reprimands I’ve gotten for free just because I thought something was fun to think about or because I tried to show I was sad. This brought me a lot of unwanted drama and friction.

So, aside from selecting things like this broader experience, my internal world is to be shared only with my select close individuals.

My Verdict

I like to make a comparison between social media and alcohol. Backing up Haidt’s conclusion, I don’t believe social media is for children. And as adults, I think its use should be measured to the extent that is not problematic. I would shy away from apps like TikTok and use Instagram only to post stories occasionally. I don’t think I missed out on anything, to be honest. Everyone who noticed I wasn’t there contacted me and showed me they cared to build a relationship with me beyond the occasional food photo or climbing video. So, from now on, I might use it sparingly in the future, but for now, I’ll try to quit it altogether.

I hope I get texts or comments from many of you reading this. Thanks!