Life Without Social Media

Layth Barzangi
20 min readAug 14, 2019

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Image credit: Steve Cutts - “Smartphone Zombies”

I was an early adopter and a very active presence for many years on most major social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Google+ (RIP), Foursquare/Swarm, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat, and Path (RIP), among others. (Twitter took a little while but a friend eventually sold it to me.)

Then, sometime in early 2015, I decided to pull the plug and quit cold turkey. I didn’t leave any of my accounts dormant, making the content available “for posterity”. No, I promptly deleted them all (leaving only LinkedIn for professional use). I offered no explanations. There were no farewell posts. It was a conscious decision on my part to not allow any room for discussion, which would have definitely led to some of my friends attempting to persuade me to change my mind. To everyone on my friends list, I literally disappeared without a trace off the face of the social media landscape overnight.

It was one of the best decisions I have ever made.

There has been a lot written about this topic, sparking heated debate and ongoing controversy. Hundreds of studies have been carried out about the far-reaching effects of social media on our lives, arriving at a variety of conclusions but with no real consensus.

This article will not refer to any of these opinions, debates, controversies, or studies. It is purely about my own personal experience of living life without social media, the consequences of that decision, and my own conclusions.

A social media-free life, in one word

I was actually asked this question by a friend. How would I describe life without social media in one word?

"Peaceful."

This is no exaggeration. For an actively engaged social media user, the amount of mental clutter and noise that would be eliminated as a result of such a decision cannot be overstated. It has to be experienced first hand to be fully appreciated. To give you an idea, imagine reducing the frequency of daily notifications on your smartphone by as much as 80%. Even if you only immediately tend to half of those, that is still a significant amount of time spent with your attention scattered and your mind constantly distracted. Reversing this situation has huge benefits that immediately impact many aspects of your life, personally and professionally.

But before I go into these benefits in detail, I first want to get one thing out of the way...

The argument against quitting social media

This has developed over the years, and has become sort of the standard argument that is usually deployed by social media advocates and enthusiasts. They cite some combination of the following reasons:

Connectivity: “Social media has become an intrinsic part of our lives. To be disconnected is to be cut off from what is happening around you, whether in your immediate social circle, or on a larger scale in your local community, and all the way beyond the borders, regionally and globally.”

Really? I don’t feel cut off at all. Socially, I’m still easily reachable via phone, email, or WhatsApp. And frankly, I prefer these means of communication because they get straight to the point and don’t come with any extra fluff that adds no value to the exchange. As for staying aware of the world around me, I don’t see how social media has any advantage over other means of acquiring and consuming information. As far as I’m concerned, RSS is still king, so a good news aggregator app — I use Feedly — with carefully subscribed feeds and well-configured filters can provide you with a highly personalised and super-lean news package that is as easily customisable as it is scalable. Additionally, services such as Google Discover, an AI-driven, card-based news feed available for Android and iOS, has proven highly successful at providing (and suggesting) increasingly relevant content based on my browsing, searching, and reading habits. For me, that beats thumb-flicking aimlessly through infinitely-scrolling social media timelines, sifting through all the filler in an attempt to find something interesting to explore.

Communication: “People have moved on from the “old school” ways of communicating (phone, text/instant messaging, email). Social media has given us more sophisticated means to communicate, interact and share our lives with each other. You’re missing out!”

No, I’m not missing out. I’m perfectly fine interacting socially with family and friends in a manner that’s direct and only about what matters. Back during my active social media days, I confess that I was guilty of oversharing, like almost everyone else. But having been there and done that, I’ve come to see the sheer inanity of it. I’m really not interested in your awesome, artistic Instagram shot of the chocolate soufflé you had this morning, or snaps of your cat from seventeen different angles. But mostly, I’m baffled beyond belief by grownups, some even beyond their thirties, who still think it’s okay to share short clips of themselves fooling around with the Snapchat dog filter.

So if you want to share some good news, like the pictures of your newborn twins, that’s lovely. You have my email. Granted, I won’t be one of those who’ll fire a passive “like” at your Facebook album. However, you’ll probably get a more genuine response from me, and I’ll save the best part of it to when I see you personally. No amount of likes or emojis can compete with that.

Professional Development: “Social media can provide you with more opportunities to advance your professional career. Having active social media accounts will increase your exposure and discoverability, and will allow potential employers or business partners to know more about you, personally and professionally, even before you step into that first interview or meeting.”

We’ve all heard the famous saying, “Don’t mix business with pleasure…” (To which I’ll add, “…unless pleasure is your business.” — but that’s a whole different story.)

Regardless of what profession you’re in, it will always be a slippery slope attempting to maintain a social media presence where your personal and professional lives do not overlap. It’s true that you can make use of the business-oriented services provided by some social media platforms (e.g. Facebook Pages or business accounts on Twitter and Instagram) to promote yourself professionally (even though they’re more suited to businesses as opposed to individuals), but that only adds extra overhead because now you have to maintain additional accounts while staying consciously aware of the nature of the content you post. Additionally, unless all your personal social media accounts are private, those seeking you out online for professional evaluation, whether for potential employment, a possible business partnership, or just to contract your services, will definitely come across your personal accounts, and whether you like it or not, the content in these accounts will influence their first impression of you.

From my experience, all this does is add unnecessary layers of complexity and confusion to the business of promoting yourself online as a professional. To keep matters simple and effective, stick to LinkedIn as the platform of choice. It was designed for that, so make maximum use of the features it provides, and from there link to other specialty platforms that showcase your work: GitHub if you’re a software developer; Behance if you’re a creative professional; Upwork if you provide freelance services of any kind. These are just a few examples. Even better, it costs almost nothing to build and promote your own blog-based website, and with some proper SEO, you can make sure that when someone googles you, it’s the website that shows up and not the latest Instagram post where your attempt at a Baywatch-style jog got photobombed by your own dog.

Technophobia: “Don’t be a Luddite! Social media is the biggest revolution in communications since the invention of the internet. How can someone in our technology-based modern times intentionally decide to become an anti-social, digital hermit?”

Let’s make something clear up front: anti-social media ≠ anti-social. In fact, if anything, social media has, ironically enough, made us less social in the traditional sense of the word. I used to see that during my active social media days, and like it or not, you unconsciously end up getting pulled into it. You know what I’m talking about: that all too common image of people meeting somewhere, sharing a table at a café or a similar place, only to end up barely speaking to each other and instead having their faces buried into their phones the whole time. I’d caught myself involved in something similar a few times, and even back then I’d noticed how pathetic it was, but the allure of the screen was most of the time too strong to resist.

Yes, it is a form of addiction. There you go, I said it and I stand by it.

The “technophobia” charge is even more ridiculous in this context. Anyone who knows me well enough can testify that I’m a huge science/technology fan and follower, and I’ll be the first to argue that the immense advances in these fields, kicking off with the Technological Revolution at the end of the 19th century, have significantly improved the quality of our everyday lives. Fast forward a century and we have the Digital Revolution transforming our lives once again. The combination of powerful smart devices and social media platforms was bound to shake up the very foundations of human relationships and communication, but at what cost? Apart from the growing erosion of personal privacy (mostly by choice due to oversharing), and the constant effort of maintaining your online persona in order to stay “engaged” and “current” (a form of peer pressure), the inescapable itch to check your social media timelines every now and then, just to see what everyone else is up to, adds up to a monumental waste of time on the long run — time that would be better spent doing much more useful and productive things with your life.

So if you want to brand me a “Social Media Luddite” in light of the above, then please do. It’s a title I wear with pride.

The benefits of life without social media

Peace of mind

Imagine experiencing the quiet isolation of the countryside after years of living in a busy city district. Here’s a more relatable example: imagine turning off a high power vacuum cleaner after operating it continuously for hours. You almost breathe a sigh of relief, as your nerves and senses come down from an elevated level of stimulation to a state of rest. That’s what eliminating social media from your life feels like. You do away with a massive amount of useless noise, and you give your brain a much needed respite from the long term bombardment that you’ve been subjecting it to. Trust me, the experience is almost Zen-like in its blissfulness.

The first consequence of this change is that you notice an immediate shift in your character. You become more mellow, less irritable and temperamental, less prone to anxiety and worry, and you discover an almost inexhaustible repository of patience and resilience that you didn’t realise (or maybe forgot) you had. But most importantly, you reacquire a sharpened sense of focus and direction, as all the clutter that was fragmenting your attention is now gone. As a result, you become more efficient at handling anything that comes your way, and with your ability to successfully evaluate, plan, and prioritise matters fully restored, you let things that truly don’t matter slide. It’s a great win both personally and professionally. I guarantee that you’ll be surprised at how tremendously fulfilling this is.

Reclaiming lost time

Your time is extremely precious, and it’s without doubt the biggest and most important victim that is claimed by social media use. If you genuinely value your time and understand that it is the only true currency that is worth measuring the value of your life with, you will begin to realise what a colossal waste it is squandering it away on social media.

Here’s a simple experiment: Before you make the common claim that time flies or that there never seems to be enough time to get anything properly done, take stock of your daily routine and do some quick math, adding up roughly how much time you spend on social media. Extrapolate the result across a whole week, a month, or even a year, and you’ll be shocked by the results. Now, try to express this wasted time in terms of all the things that you want to do but can’t seem to find the time for, and then see if you can honestly look at yourself in the mirror and make the above claim again.

The combination of the above two benefits can be profoundly transformative. I do not exaggerate when I say that in many ways, it can put you back in the driving seat and allow you to take full control of your life again.

For those of us old enough to remember a time before social media (or even the internet itself), it brings back a lost aspect of human interaction that, despite the prevalence of digital tech in our lives, we still instinctively yearn for. A time when socialising with family or friends was purely about the collective experience of direct engagement, without the unnecessary intrusion of any outside digital community that, in all honesty, has no business being part of the moment. A time when attending a music concert or any other artistic performance was only about enjoying the performance and not having to worry about trying to get a shot through a sea of raised phones, where everyone is missing out on the real essence of the experience because they’re obsessed with getting that perfect bootleg clip that they can use to show off on their social media accounts, which only translates to, “Hey look at how awesome I am, I was there!” Well so were a few thousand other people with phones, so guess what, that doesn’t make you unique.

I cannot speak on behalf of the younger people who grew up during the internet/social media age, as I said in the beginning that this article will be solely about my own experience. However, I can make an educated assumption that for them, quitting social media can be an experience of great positive discovery, not much different in its ultimate outcome from my own. As I elaborate further below on some more specific aspects of my experience, it will become evident that whether you’re from my generation or younger, weaning yourself off social media will open the door to fully enjoy some important victories that we can all share and benefit from, and I’m sure you can add some of yours, based on your own personal circumstance. Here are mine:

1. Productivity and skill building

I’ve been working in the digital technology industry (majorly in the internet field) for almost two decades. I’ve always been self taught, building my experience and know-how from project work during employment and from freelance jobs, in addition to my own research, learning and experimentation. Having done this both before and after my social media shutdown, I have experienced first hand the great difference it makes.

To produce any work of value, your mind needs to be clear enough to enter a level of deep concentration and maintain it long enough to fully engage with the task at hand. In psychology this is known as flow, or more colloquially as being in the zone. You need to be able to do this both easily and frequently enough in order to maximise your productivity and get the best out of the designated time you’ve allocated in the day, whether it’s normal working hours if you’re employed or a scheduled plan you’re following if you work for yourself. In all cases, removing the distractions of social media greatly reduces schedule overruns and unnecessary overtime, if not eliminate them completely.

This applies even more significantly when you’re doing your own self-development and learning. Here the allure of taking a “quick break” to check social media is harder to resist, probably because what you’re doing doesn’t have the same sense of urgency and accountability as a work task. How many times have you found yourself in the process of learning something, only to get distracted by that row of bookmarked social media icons in your browser toolbar, tempting you to click for one more quick peek? Your experience may vary, but let me tell you, even without the bookmarks, it’s still easy to lose your flow and find yourself pulled out of your learning session. All it takes is a click in the address bar plus one letter from your keyboard, and autocomplete will do the rest for you. Damn!

It has been four years (and counting) since I’ve quit social media. During this time, I’ve managed to continuously acquire new skills and knowledge in my field at an accelerated rate that I haven’t experienced (and enjoyed) in quite a long time. This is of particular importance to me right now, as the day job that I’m currently in is completely outside my industry. (Hey, sometimes you have to take what life offers you to make ends meet and pay the bills.) As a result of this, I’ve been able to keep myself sufficiently up-to-date and current in an industry that is rapidly changing like very few industries are.

Tip: When I take a short break from a work task or a learning session (something you should do), and despite having no social media, I still do not jump online — no email or checking the news or anything similar. Instead, I completely step away from the computer and leave my phone at the desk. I might go for a walk, or grab a tea/coffee and step outside for a change of scenery (weather permitting), or sit back and listen to a relaxing piece of music (instrumentals are more recommended here). If it can be helped, it’s even better to conduct these break rituals in solitude. This makes it much easier to slip back into that all important flow state, and you’ll find yourself immediately picking up from where you left off with almost no effort whatsoever.

Conclusion: As a professional in any industry, your value in an increasingly competitive economy is measured by the skills and experience that allow you to produce work that is both meaningful and rare enough to be sought out and rewarded. In contrast, social media activity hardly carries any substantial value — any elementary school kid with a phone can do it. It is the digital equivalent of unskilled labour, and as in any market, unskilled labour occupies the bottom rung on the ladder and only gets paid minimum wage. So ask yourself again, why would you want to dedicate any fraction of the time of your day to that?

2. Rediscovering the joy of reading

I was an avid reader as a child. Apart from the classic works of children’s fiction and an assortment of modern stories, my insatiable curiosity and interest in the world around us meant that my home library also included popular science books about nature, space and the universe, and how things work, written mostly for young readers. Almost every weekend, my father would take me on a tour of bookshops to see if there’s anything interesting to buy. During my teens, reading took a partial backseat as I got more into sports. It also coincided with the arrival of the home computer. (Shout out to all you 80’s kids/teens out there!) This pushed reading even further down the activity list, but didn’t completely stop it. This continued as my love of computer technology grew from a hobby into a profession. However, it was the internet, and more specifically the arrival of social media, that almost put the kibosh on reading. It didn’t quite stop completely, but I was finishing books at a dismal rate, and abandoning books more than any time before. Even those books that I finished, I noticed that I was not retaining their content as well as I used to before. The culprit was obvious and I knew what had to be done.

Ever since I quit, I’ve managed to steadily build up to a rate of reading that is as good as my childhood days, probably even better, and my level of retention has become almost photographic. I’ve also expanded into several genres that weren’t really at the top of my interest before. (My to-read list is almost a 70/30 split in favour of non-fiction now.) It’s been an incredibly rewarding experience to rekindle this old passion.

I do most of my reading during the commute to work, which is almost an hour each way on the metro. And while I’d been for the longest time a traditionalist who favoured physical books, I decided to convert to e-books purely for practical reasons. (Audiobooks are out of the question. I absolutely loathe them as they just don’t work for me.) Right now, my phone carries a to-read list of around 80 titles (including some series), so I’m happily set for the next year or so.

Tip: This might not work for you as it’s a somewhat radical step, but I’ll mention it here because its impact on many aspects of my life has been significant, and specifically so on my reading habits. When I quit social media, I also downgraded my phone plan from postpaid with open data to prepaid with zero data. This means that if there’s no free WiFi around, I’m blissfully off the grid. Yes, there is free WiFi on the metro, but I don’t feel compelled to connect at all, even to check email, news, or WhatsApp. This is my sacred reading time. So if there really is a genuine emergency, like a global extinction level event or the sky is raining frogs, you can still call me or send me a text.

Conclusion: Reading is an activity that has significant benefits both physically and mentally, a fact that has been backed up by science. These include, among many others, stress reduction, lowered levels of depression and anxiety, improved memory and analytical skills, and reducing the chances of developing dementia or Alzheimer’s in later life. More obvious benefits include knowledge enrichment, the expansion of your vocabulary, and improved writing skills. This of course depends on the quality of the books that you read, so you should be smart about what titles you add to your list. (Twilight and Fifty Shades of Grey fans can leave right now and head back to their Tumblr safe spaces.) In contrast, social media use is almost entirely antithetical to reading in every aspect mentioned above. It really should be a no-brainer (pun intended) which one you should invest your time and effort in.

3. More time for genuine human interaction

Picture this with me for a moment: I’m taking the family out for a picnic at a public park. We park the car, grab our stuff and walk through the park looking for a nice spot to settle in. As we walk, I look around at the other people there, and what I see makes me shake my head in despair: About a dozen ‘friends’ gathered on a large mat, apparently already done with the food, and just sitting/lying there busy with their phones, very similar to the café situation I mentioned earlier. You want worse? A couple with three young kids, toddler to elementary school age. The kids are playing with each other while their parents are sitting in their foldable chairs, lost in their phones and completely ignoring the little ones. I sometimes feel like marching up to those so-called ‘parents’ and slapping them silly. Honestly, ditch the phone and engage with your kids for crying out loud. I could go on, but you get the idea.

Back before I quit, I confess that to a certain extent I was guilty of similar behaviour. Not just with family, but also with friends or coworkers. My phone was always within reach, ready to be picked up with the next notification tone, completely snatching me out of whatever I was supposed to be engaged with. It’s unhealthy behaviour to say the least, and it’s even harder to resist when those you’re with are also doing it (in the case of friends/coworkers). Yes, you can turn off notifications or put your phone on silent, but these are only half solutions that don’t really tackle the root of the problem.

After using social media for the best part of eight years, I’m convinced beyond doubt that it is seriously detrimental to natural, healthy human relationships. No matter who you are, the persona that you project online through your social media accounts will never be a completely honest reflection of your true self. We pick things to post about that show others what a great time we’re having; we choose the best selfie angles in the best light, not to mention the excessive filters we put almost everything through; we post self-affirming blurbs from ‘quotable’ people whom we most likely haven’t heard of five minutes earlier, in an attempt to appear wise and worldly, and then we monitor the retweets, hearts, likes and comments for validation to bolster our fragile self-esteem. It’s one big, fat, phony charade and everyone is a guilty participant. You sit behind that false facade long enough (or worse yet, you happen to be from the generation who was born and grew up behind it), and you start to lose touch with reality. People have forgotten how to interact naturally with each other without their screens to hide behind. It’s a sad state of affairs where our social intelligence and emotional maturity are the first casualties.

I’d like to see a return to the good, old-fashioned traditions of human social engagement, before social media encroached on our lives like an inoperable brain tumour. Public establishments (cafés, restaurants, pubs, etc.) should reinstate the ‘no phone’ policy that many of them used to enforce in the pre-smartphone era. You check in your handsets at the door and give instructions to staff not to disturb you at all, except, if necessary, for calls from numbers that you designate. Time for people to rediscover what it’s like to be fully present at social gatherings, without checking into Swarm/Foursquare to bolster their Mayor status, or grabbing their phone and — quite rudely — asking people not to touch anything because they want to take the time to get the best Instagram shot of the food order that just arrived.

Tip: When my family and I are out for any kind of activity (picnic, dining out, entertainment, etc.), we turn off the phones and leave them in the car. If we want to take photos, we’d bring along our trusty digital camera for that. There was this great idea I came across online that should prove useful when you’re out with friends, coworkers, or associates: All phones are stacked, face down, in a pile in the middle of the table. Whoever cracks and reaches for their phone first to check or post on social media ends up paying the entire bill, even if the outing was originally on the company dollar. This should work like a charm to stave off even those with the weakest willpower! Of course, quitting social media altogether is the ideal solution. But that’s fine; gradual steps are better than nothing.

Conclusion: The sanctity of natural, genuine human interaction has taken a major blow since the arrival of social media. People have made their social media accounts part of their ‘brand identity’, presenting them as the first (and in many cases the only) layer of interaction with the outside world, and needlessly inviting anyone with internet access into their own nicely-polished and carefully scripted and edited personal reality show. It’s fake, intrusive, and most importantly, it has seriously hobbled our social and emotional growth, especially in the case of younger people.

It’s high time to rediscover what it’s like to fully engage in sincere, authentic, face-to-face relationships, keeping in mind that these are opportunities we cannot get back once they pass. Be present and active with your immediate family and at larger family gatherings. Get together occasionally with your friends or coworkers and engage in uninterrupted discussions about any topic under the sun. If you enjoy a certain hobby or craft, find groups and communities that bring people together to work, interact, and socialise around their shared interest. These are only few examples of normal, healthy human behaviour that have been sadly overshadowed and harmed by the false allure of social media use. We owe it to ourselves to push back against this addiction with full force, so we can give the opportunity to ourselves, and especially the younger people among us, to break out of the bubble and grow and mature socially, emotionally, and intellectually at a natural pace, staying in touch with the real world and guaranteeing that we are fully equipped with the necessary skills and know-how to deal with it smartly and effectively.

Final thoughts

As a human being, your personal worth and good standing in society is measured by how much compassion you have towards your fellow human (and other creatures), how well you contribute to the betterment of society through your skills, knowledge, and innovation, and how good you are at keeping your feet on the ground in face of the rapidly rising tsunami of detachment, incompetence and hypocrisy that social media has brought with it. It is not measured by likes, retweets, comments, the number of followers you have, or whether or not you have a blue check mark next to your name. Once you fully understand this important truth, it should become evidently clear that shedding the rotting skin of social media is not only liberating, but it might also inspire others who may be aware of the negative effect it’s having on their lives, but don’t have the will or the way to free themselves.

I hope my story has inspired you.

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Layth Barzangi

Dubai-based web tech aficionado. Language lover. Lifelong carnivore.