What happens when you stop paying the price of social media

When deleted her social media apps, she realised she had spent 10 years buying into ‘the age of no reason’, which had nearly robbed her of an invaluable orientation toward time, history and memory

Aquiet student recently stood in the middle of an uproarious gathering with his head bowed, intently flipping through his phone. Around him, his peers were posting selfies wearing splashes of cheery, colourful and mismatched items on reels and stories as part of a national campaign to raise awareness about the mental health challenges people face globally.

I walked over and asked him what’s up. “I deleted all my social media apps ahead of the exams,” he said, clearly pained at the idea of having to download any of it for the sole purpose of a post.

I thought about that student for quite some time afterward. Not only because he was so evidently invested in his academic performance, but also because I had done exactly the same thing 10 months previously, with not a single exam in sight.

In a recent essay in The Atlantic, titled Why the Past 10 years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid, Jonathan Haidt posits that social media has (in the years since writes, is “almost perfectly designed to bring out both our most moralistic and least reflective selves”.

This revelation is hardly climate science, but it did take me just over a decade to realise how different my life in this orbit would have been if I were, say, 10 years younger.

Social media (and all its purported intrigues such as TikTok CEOs and cancelled people) did not exist in my formative years – and were it not for the enthralling intersection of Bordieu’s social capital with Sartre’s existential project, I’d most likely never have fashioned public personal palimpsests with such alacrity.

For people like the student on a social media hiatus, these platforms have tapped into previously unheard-of reserves for written and photographed filters that likely serve as codes for all manners of romantic, collegial, professional or general interactions.

A 2022 study by Nature showed social media networks fulfil myriad psychosocial needs among younger people, including our feelings – a bizarre stopgap for the avalanche of mental distress social media is known to cause.

A few months after I signed off social media networks, I found the quiet that my extremely crowded interior world had stuffed into a corner. I found perfumed notes written by hand and Fujifilm packets full of old-school printed photographs.

I found long drives without stopping for a sunset shot and diary entries filled with events, thoughts and feelings that only I had ever had the opportunity to read (and judge).

For 10 years, I had had hundreds of conversations employing only GIFs, filters and wilfully omitting a response. For more than a decade, I suffocated under the weight of balancing this carte blanche with (self-imposed) restraint, but I persevered and played host to hundreds of unwelcome people, interactions and thoughts with latent resentment.

The most significant discovery, however, dislodged itself from within my psyche and was lying in wait. Nearly one year after deleting