I know how you felt reading the title. If you are a heavy social media user, you probably said:
"What? Who in their right mind would delete their social media accounts? How are they supposed to live life and talk to their friends?"
Don't worry. That was me last year. I understand your feelings. However, the disadvantages of social media and the perks of deleting it far outweigh its benefits. In this post, I will go over the reasons why you should delete all of your social media.
Affects Your Mental Health
Whenever people hear that social media affects your mental health, they agree but say that it does not affect them specifically. The most common argument I hear is:
"Yeah, I know that it affects other people. However, I am fine with it. I feel normal and do not feel depressed at all.
All I can say is not to trust what your brain tells you whenever you are dealing with any addiction, not just social media. Think about it. The same brain that is telling you that you should keep using social media for meaningless reasons is the one telling you that it is not affecting you.
Social media is a constant source of comparison. You open it up, view a few triggering posts, find out that your favourite actor has passed away, and see your friends perfect lives. Before closing the app, you apply filters to yourself and edit the picture as much as possible for your stories to make yourself look artificially good.
You see, not only is social media fake, it also has an absurd effect on your mental health. It has been proven that many social media platforms track you to show you personalised content. They use human psychology to hook you onto their platforms.
There are two chemicals in your brain that are responsible for happiness:
- Dopamine - released when you are anticipating something good
- Endorphin - released when you are happy
In many cases, the effect of dopamine is much greater than the effect of endorphins. Recall back to a young age when you realised you were about to receive a toy that you had been waiting for for a few days. The feeling you got when you realised you would get it soon was more intense than the actual feeling of getting the toy.
The same trick applies on social media. Many social media platforms show you content that is completely different from the content that you like just before showing you content that you really like. This results in more dopamine being released, with a good amount of endorphin being released as well. To your brain, it has just achieved something great when, in reality, you have not.
Constantly high dopamine and endorphin releases raise your base happiness levels. This is why things that you used to love now seem boring to you. It is not 'growing up'. It is your social media addiction.
Social media metrics also contribute to this. It makes you think that likes and comments are proportional to your worth, which is simply not the case. When you get a like, it is a form of validation that you are valuable to someone. Someone not liking your post does not mean that you are not valuable.
FOMO (fear of missing out) plays a big role as well. The phrase:
"If everyone is using [insert anything here], why shouldn't I?"
is commonly said by an individual who experiences FOMO without the thing in question. There is a constant fear of missing out on information, which simply will not happen. You may miss some arbitrary information that you would not care about otherwise, but this is not a reason at all to continue using social media.
To hook you into their addiction, social media companies hire "attention designers" who take references and inspiration from casinos to keep you hooked.
Before ending this unexpectedly long section, I would like you to read this quote.
"You're either on, and you're connected and distracted all the time, or you're off, but then you're wondering, Am I missing something important? In other words, you're either distracted or you have a fear of missing out."
Tristan Harris, Former Design Ethicist at Google
Privacy
If you post everything you do on social media, there is no longer any privacy. Anything you do is public information. If you have a 'private' account, your friends know everything you do. There is no privacy at all if you keep posting everything on social media.
Then there is the elephant in the room.
Digital Privacy.
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