Saying Goodbye to Instagram and Facebook
I am happy to say that despite 10+ years spent on these platforms, I have permanently deleted my Facebook and Instagram accounts. Sure, right now among the controversy and whistleblowing about toxic company practices in regards to the negative effects on young people’s mental health, I’m a drop of water in the ocean of users deleting their Facebook and Instagram accounts. The rallying cries of #DeleteFacebook and #DeleteInstagram have been circling the social zeitgeist for the last few years or so in relation to improper customer data usage, Russian hackers, and for being an organizational tool for a literal domestic terror threat,
Cultural shifts aside, this just happened to be the right time for me to let go. In order to try and work through my mental health issues, I’ve begun a deep reflection of social media platforms and how they have helped and/or harmed me throughout my young adult life. Facebook, while being considered the “first” major social network, was far predated in my own life by the likes of MySpace, Neopets, and Twitter. In high school, tumblr reigned supreme in being a creative sharing platform and Facebook stayed in the recesses of my adolescent mind as a photo dump space. Instagram didn’t even begin to rise to popularity until my early college years. These platforms, while really only representing a blip of time in my own life, felt virtually impossible to let go of—in the most absolutely integral to life and I can’t live without it kind of way. For me personally, this is largely due to my lifelong struggles with OCD and depression that I am now beginning to learn how to manage in adult life. Quite simply, being addicted to the immediate validation coupled with the compulsive scrolling of feeds was actively eating away at me and nestling comfortably into the dark corners of my mind that were already predisposed to be affected. The meteoric rise of content creator culture, feelings of “FOMO”, and overall sensory overload is more than the human mind has adapted to handle emotionally.
I do think most, or all, social media networks have the potential to exacerbate mental illness in people of any age. That being said, I don’t disagree that there are benefits with regards to sharing art and expression, it’s just important to realize when to draw the line between what you create for yourself and what you churn for “content”. I am attempting to take a break from posting content on any social media right now, and plan on focusing on my writing, art, and creating for myself on my website.
