I don’t update my personal Instagram, Facebook or Twitter (sorry, I can’t bring myself to call it X) accounts anymore.

But we can still be friends 😊

The truth is, I much prefer real connections with people.

Here are some ways we can connect:

• You could send me a message to say hello. (Please do this. I really enjoy hearing from people. Even if we’ve never met, I promise it’s not weird.)

• You could sign up to receive my newsletter, which is in the process of being relaunched very soon and I will aim to send it out regularly, certainly whenever I publish a new blog post.

Why I quit Instagram, Facebook and Twitter:

1. One of the things that I hated about social media was that I’d ‘follow’ someone and then rarely see what they were up to, thanks to the ever-changing algorithm! Ever since the chronological timeline on corporate social media platforms was replaced by one that’s dictated by an algorithm for the sole purpose of keeping you on the app for as long as possible, they simply aren’t useful for writers or any kind of independent artist. Chances are your followers don’t even see your content half the time. Social media is also useless for academics - Professor Inger Mewburn wrote recently, “Facebook has been functionally useless as a way for me to promote my work for about 8 years. I’m lucky if 300 people out of my over 27,000 follower base see a post unless I pay the Meta landlord.” [source]

2. It doesn’t matter how often you post, how beautiful your photos are or how painstakingly-worded your captions are - if you don’t already have an audience (and even then, see Inger Mewburn’s quote above), it’s almost impossible to convince the algorithm to show your content and therefore grow your following in any meaningful way. It’s all down to chance - not unlike buying a lottery ticket, which might be fun but ultimately is a lousy investment, as the brilliant Seth Godin put it.

3. More to the point, you don’t own your content. That’s right, all the laboured-over captions and gorgeous photos you’ve spent hours and hours on over the years are technically owned by the platforms you upload them to. Ditto your audience - if your account gets hacked or Instagram decides to shut down your account for whatever reason, all those followers are gone and you have to start again. It’s happened to lots of people I know. That’s why I decided, if I was going to share things online, I was going to do it on a platform I controlled and where I wasn’t making any morally-dubious billionaires richer.

4. It’s a breeding ground for neediness and drama. It didn’t bring out the best in me. It exacerbated my FOMO, took a toll on my mental health and wasted thousands of hours of my life where I could have been writing, exercising, earning money, learning a language, spending time with people I love, you name it. It made me angry, it made me depressed, it made me focus on the wrong things. I also don’t think it brought out the best in some people I followed, or who followed me. I was on the receiving end of a lot of problematic behaviour over the years, both from “friends” and from people I didn’t even know, which was stressful and upsetting. So removing myself from the platforms also removed a lot of drama from my life, which was incredibly welcome.

5. The algorithm rewards content that gets a lot of engagement, and that includes posts that provoke violence, making them very unsafe spaces for vulnerable people. This remains the case despite numerous demands for change. If you’re a sensitive person, spending a lot of time on these platforms that are designed to show you things that will make you angry/upset/fired up (basically anything that will keep you on the platform for as long as possible) can bring your mood down and impact your mental health in ways you might not even be aware of.

6. There is plenty of evidence to suggest social media is problematic. Social media is addictive, because they have designed it to be. We know it is harming our mental health, particularly in young people (The Guardian first reported on this in 2015). We know it is a space where bullying; targeting of women, people of colour, trans people, queer people and other vulnerable groups; and dangerous rhetoric and vigilantism are allowed to propagate. And yet the companies who make billions from it every year still go unregulated and unaccountable. I reached a point where that was no longer acceptable to me, and so I decided to vote with my attention, energy and delete button.

7. The six reasons above are why I stepped away in the first place, but the reason I’ve stayed away for nearly two years now is purely and simply because I have my life, brain, creativity, confidence and attention span back. I’m not going to relinquish those again without a fight! In the first week, my screen time was down 81% and remains a fraction of what it used to be. I have hours and hours of time back to spend on meaningful things like activism, writing, nature, creative projects and my family and friends. I sleep better. I don’t view my life through the lens of content planning anymore, I just let myself be in the moment, without a thought as to how shareable it is. Life without social media is great! The benefits have far, far outweighed the occasional downsides.

Please know that just because I decided to no longer participate in social media doesn’t mean I think you need to do the same. We are all allowed to do what’s best for ourselves.

But if you’re curious, I’ve written several blog posts, and an article that was published in The Guardian in May 2023, about the journey I’ve had quitting social media:

• How it started as an experiment

• How it was going, four months in

• Six months off social media

• “In the year since I quit social media, my screen time has fallen, my mood is up - even my resting heart rate is lower - my Guardian article

• 15 months later, and the response to my Guardian article

• Interview on ABC Radio Sydney (May 2023)

• Interview on ABC Radio Hobart (July 2023).

And here are some excellent articles and resources from others (a list I’ll keep adding to):

• Gwenn Seemel on how social media cheats you out of your creativity and how it weakens your art. Gwenn is also comfortable declaring that social media is officially dead (and I wholeheartedly agree). Just check out everything Gwenn does - she rocks. I have taken a lot of inspiration from her.

• Cory Doctorow: The ‘Enshittification of TikTok’, or how, exactly, platforms die - “First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.” A brilliant, incisive look at how social media is becoming a virtual graveyard.

• Inger Mewburn: following on from Doctorow’s article, the ‘enshittification’ of academic social media. “Telling academics they can achieve career success by using today’s algorithmic-driven platforms is like telling Millennials they could afford to buy a house by eating less avocado on toast. It’s a cruel lie because social media is a shit way to share your work now.” YES. YES to everything in this excellent article.

• Johann Hari: Your attention didn’t collapse. It was stolen. I also highly recommend Johann Hari’s excellent book Stolen Focus.

• Olivia Yallop: Break the Internet - another excellent book that really confirmed for me that social media was not somewhere I wanted to continue investing any time or energy in.

• Oliver Burkeman: Four Thousand Weeks

• Creative Boom on how to promote and build a creative business without social media

• Sharon Horwood: Want to delete your social media but can’t bring yourself to do it? Some ways to take that step

• Michelle Gia: I quit social media and it was the best decision of my life (video)

• Goal Guys: I quit social media for 365 days (and reclaimed my life) (video)

• Ruri Ohama: How to break social media addiction and actually start living (video)