Should You Unplug From Social Media?

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It’s widely believed these days that so many people, especially youth, are helplessly devoted to social media. There’s many that follow the stereotype where all they do is tweet, instagram, scroll, and snap all day long. While that may not be the case with all young people, social media use is still growing in numbers. For example in an Ampere Analysis people who were between 18 and 24 sing a completely different tune about social media. In fact 66% of that demographic agreed that “social media is important to me” in 2016, only 57% make this claim in 2018.

For this particular reason it’s well worth looking at what it means to go dark and to put down the phone for a change, or even deleting one of the many social media accounts that we have.

One thing that it means to log off social media is you get to be more honest with yourself. While there certainly is a wave to be more authentic in posts on social media, there are many platforms where we are filtering ourselves. At the end of the day a platform can easily be a place where people were presenting their dishonest version of themselves to a group of people doing the exact same thing.

Another aspect of social media is that it can be incredibly depressing. Logging off of it can actually bring you a lot of joy and relaxation which is certainly needed. When you’re constantly checking your feed, and comparing yourself to those filtered lifestyles, people always smiling and having a good time. Even if you know that may not be that persons lifestyle, it still can be depressing. It’s for this reason why studies show social media can cause depression for a number of people.

Logging off of social media can also signify that you don’t care about popularity games. While there are certainly some elements of it in adulthood, it’s far more prominent in the lives of the younger generation. It’s to the point that people judge you based on how many followers that you have.

At the end of the day, more and more people are logging off of social media for the desire to build more authentic offline friendships. Even as adults our circle of friends are small, but not all the relationships we have are deep or meaningful. They are as artificial as the followers we have on Instagram, Snapchat or Twitter and about as relatable as our “friends” on Facebook.

So if you are thinking of closing an account or two, go for it. The amount of relief is well worth considering.