are we all self-flagellating with a social media whip?
The answer is yes, but how else am I supposed to find the news
One woman’s journey against technology or herself. 1
CALL TO ADVENTURE
Since joining Substack a month ago, I’ve noticed myself engaging with this platform similarly to how I consume social media. There’s a lot of comparison. What at first was admiration and appreciation for other contributors morphed into a sticky pit of jealous stew. Whenever I go on the homepage and see this person has X subscribers or received Y amount of likes on a note, I am envious. Most of you probably have no clue what I’m referring to because you’re either a) viewing this from your inbox (thank you subscribers), b) you’ve clicked a link to this article by accident, c) it was intentional, and you’re trying to sus out my literary skills.
The whole point of starting to write was to escape the echo chamber of negative self-image, something that has plagued my impish soul since I logged on to Facebook in 2012. It’s morphed from 200-picture album Facebook dumps to multiple Instagram posts from a single event to carefully curating a relatable yet unattainable persona in the 20 pictures per image swipe thing. Addicted to the feeling of strangers’ admiration, whether with words or pictures, I can easily manipulate how I portray myself.
CROSSING THE THRESHOLD
I did a social media detox over the summer and even deleted my “main” Instagram account. Yes, the one with 1k+ followers filled with the ghosts of middle school acquaintances, fleeting weekend friends from Model U.N. conferences, and college “sisters” I didn’t know personally. A healthy response would have been to run for the hills and never look back. Nevertheless, Stockholm syndrome prevailed, and I made a new Instagram account with a smaller circle, finding myself re-chained to dopamine release and cognitive distortion.
It was a sad attempt to escape the inevitable fate of being dragged back into the dragon’s lair. During my brief hiatus, which was highly peaceful, it felt like every news source, recipe, and bit of celebrity gossip was trapped behind a paywall, accessible only in exchange for some degree of mental sanity. Although I wanted to disconnect, I found it frustrating that staying informed required me to scroll through my feed. Sure, I could go to the NYT or People Magazine website (something I did, and it was impossible to find out what was going on with Dua Lipa and Callum Turner), but truthfully, I’m lazy and like to digest my media in bite-sized pieces. And how else am I supposed to find out in two clicks where Dua Lipa is vacationing?!
Our attention spans are dwindling, and social media is melting our brains. Despite the evidence that indicates all the negative consequences of engaging with social media, it’s a mainstay of human interaction for the foreseeable future. It’s also naive of researchers to ignore that people, specifically the youths, don’t care if it’s terrible. We will still do it. I’m at a point where I’ve accepted this and am working diligently at reshaping my relationship with the platforms and, of course, with myself.
CHALLENGES AND TEMPTATIONS
Unless your job requires you to be on social media, it’s probably best not to spend an average of three hours mindlessly chained to your phone. Thank you, Natalie. What a profound statement! I think the biggest challenge for me isn’t the time when I’m intentionally using social media as a search engine or checking on the status of Sabrina Carpenter’s tour outfits; it’s the times when my brain goes into autopilot, and without even recognizing what’s happened I’m fifteen minutes deep into Kim Kardashian’s Birthday posts from 2022. Does that ever happen to you?
For example, when I come home from work—the journey is about an hour to and fro, pure unadulterated exhaustion—my coming home routine is to sit on my ass and retrieve my brain-numbing pacifier to soothe all of the overstimulation that has seeped through my pores. I have plans to workout, cook dinner, clean my home, etc., but they rarely come to fruition in the first hour of arrival because I’m distracted by the convenient gap of blank space in my day. It’s tempting to turn down the unregulated space and time we stumble across to what, meditate?
Setting a time limit on your phone is helpful, and it’s also the equivalent of having a chihuahua as a guard dog. It is cute and annoying; ultimately, you can punt that thing into space and continue on your merry way. So why not delete the app? That will rid the temptation. Unfortunately for me, the addiction is strong, and I can re-download the app at any time.
THE ABYSS
The cycle of social media felt something like this:
Without being fully aware, like muscle memory, I open my phone without knowing why, and my thumb taps for Instagram to open. Because my mind can’t follow my body cues as fast, the screen is up, but I already saw this post 40 minutes ago, so I close the app. Then, 5 minutes later, I follow the same routine, but instead, cave in and watch a few stories and linger my finger a tad longer on that person who I kind of don’t like but feel socially obligated to follow. Then I think about that person: do I like them, why am I following them, what is the meaning of all of this? In 20-30 years, what will even become of my profile? Where does your data go when I delete the app? Should I delete the app? Well, no, because then how will people know I exist?
This feeling looks like being trapped in the tesseract from Interstellar. (Even thinking about that scene causes this bitch to stack all of those anxiety balls in my brain.)
TRANSFORMATION
I don’t have a clear answer to why and how these behaviors became a mainstay in my life. I’m sure if I analyzed myself and talked to my therapist, we could make some loose analyses to understand the half-life of FOMO. It was much easier to stop it after I deleted my social media, which was a flagrant misrepresentation of who I am. I don’t have the energy, and you don’t have the energy to continue to fake appearances and vying for external validation.
But it’s not about reaching a point where you don’t care what anyone thinks of you. This would be an unfair expectation to place on ourselves because we’re human, and there is some evolutionary reason why we want to be included and liked, probably because isolation and loneliness suck.
I think the main reason why I unclipped myself from the ride with 1,000 people following me is because I finally realized it’s within my locus of control to make these decisions. I understand this sounds completely stupid that I didn’t know that I could delete my profile and be unreachable to all of these people I used to know, but be honest, haven’t you ever opened the app and thought, why can’t I just leave this behind, but dismiss this thought because you could never actually do it. There’s an invisible contract between you and your social media presence that you cannot breach because something terrible will happen if you do.
The biggest thing social media has robbed me of since I was 12 was forgetting I have choices. If you can’t relate to this sentence and have never succumbed to peer pressure, I truly commend you. It’s incredible that some people know themselves and never want to veer from that path. But I am not one of those people and have dabbled in socially constructed sources of hierarchy (popular vs. non-popular, Greek life, rich kids vs. non-rich kids, and so on). When we’re teenagers and even in our early 20s, we forget that we can choose how to engage with the world, others, and ourselves. We are either preoccupied with meeting others’ standards of success or buried so deep in our shit that it’s difficult to know where to start digging to reach the surface.
I’m here to prove that it’s never too late to engage in a rebrand, and it will probably make you a lot happier in the long run. Maybe it’s all a part of my frontal lobe forming or gaining more confidence as we mature. I had a choice to continue down the path of shackles and chains to a theoretical2 concept or walk away and be grateful for the people who have followed me in real life (those who have chosen to read this far are included in this circle). Social media isn’t the only thing I purged from my psyche; I’ve also had to work on my sense of self, understanding who are safe people and who are not, and figuring out boundaries and psychological needs. I just ran you through the gamut of essential therapy topics.
Honestly, I do love social media. I love seeing funny NFL memes I can send to my brother, I love when my friend sends me a DM about a cake event I had no clue about, I love sharing funny pictures of me dressed up as a Target basket for Halloween, I love being able to see what my friends are doing on the weekends with their new friends, and I especially love when Dua posts soft-launch photos of Callum Turner. I’m happy I can start to enjoy it for its original intended purpose: catching up with those we can’t see in person and sharing bits of our lives for entertainment. And now I have a refined circle of people I don’t dread seeing when I open my phone.
RETURN
So I have a choice with how I want to engage with this “blog”— hurtful that people refer to it as this and not a literary masterpiece. I can either let it eat me from the inside out and become irrationally obsessed with if people are reading it, what they think, think I’m funny, or I can let it be and act as if I’m writing into the void. It’ll, in turn, be more amusing this way because I can pretend my words have zero social repercussions.
I started writing and sharing myself through this medium because I wanted an honest and up-front forum to showcase what I’m up to. If you read the “about” section, I briefly explain my affinity for performance, former theatre kid purr.
As for social media, the answer is yes. It seems we are all self-flagellating with a social media whip. The difference is whether you’re choosing a whip made of soft, fluffy cotton candy or one bounded by your insecurities and shortcomings. Spoiler alert: The second whip hurts a lot more.
My thoughts are not ground-breaking and earth-shattering; this is a refined thread of my internal discourse. I hope you enjoy my crazy brain!