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I know three people who deleted all their social media back in the early 2010s. None of them ever came back.
At the time I was sure they’d be back. These were the ancient days of Facebook and Twitter. Where were they going to get their memes?
That was over a decade ago. Everybody else I’ve ever known, I can look up in 10 seconds and find out exactly what they’re doing today—except these three.
They could be homeless. They could be billionaires. I have no idea.
Based on my extensive research, there are four reasons people drop out of the internet entirely and never come back:
1. The photographer’s paradox
The moment you stop to take a picture of something, you remove yourself from the experience of it. And one picture is never enough—you need the vertical, the horizontal, the different angles, the zoom out.
My wife does this with every good meal and every cool sunset, and it drives me f*cking nuts.
But you only need the photos if you have somewhere to post them. Delete that, and you get to just live your life.
2. The comparison machine
Your brain spent hundreds of thousands of years ranking you against a few dozen people in a tribe—basically, how well you could bash an antelope on the skull compared to your buddy Grog.
That same machinery now runs against millions of strangers showing you their highlight reels while you live the humdrum daily grind.
The only way to win is to stop playing. And once you stop, your brain goes back to comparing you to the people actually in your life. It’s a lot easier to “win” there.
3. The amplifier
Social media doesn’t take a happy person and make them miserable. It takes whatever insecurities or obsessiveness or narcissism you have and it turns the volume all the way up.
If that’s your wiring, every scroll makes you feel a little worse. At some point you leave just to make it stop.
And once it stops, why would you turn it back on?
4. Social media favors extroverts
The most engaged people online are the most social people offline. If you’re introverted, you were never getting much out of it anyway. You don’t miss a party you didn’t want to be at.
The less time I spend online myself, the more I get it. I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything. Mostly I feel joy that I don’t have to know what everybody else is doing.
If you’re chronically online and it’s driving you crazy, try it. Delete the apps, buy a sh*tty burner phone for a couple weeks, and see what happens.
Maybe you’ll never come back.
