I am particularly interested in your discussion of appstinence (good word!) vs. moderate use.
It mirrors my experience with alcohol, and I think that of many other heavy substance users - that is, moderation for me is simply not a viable option.
It is as if the steady increase in use over time resulted in a ratchet that never releases, or resets, but can only go upward. Even after months of zero alcohol intake, when I had grown convinced I could now safely have a drink or two, I either 'white knuckled' the day to when I could sink a drink, or returned to peak use within as little as 48 hours.
Wrestling with that very strong impulse - overwhelmingly strong, ultimately - was far harder than deciding to rule out alcohol in perpetuity. I believe after a certain point, your brain is rewired in such a way that there is no 'safe' amount.
But if you approach abstinence in the right way, It stops it being even a question in your mind - and when you notice you aren't looking at the bottles in the supermarket, or not thinking twice about getting a tea rather than a beer, you feel liberated, not deprived. Grateful that you are the master of your life again, and that your self-respect is not under permanent threat. I have been booze-free for 12 months. Long may it last.
I am no expert, but I suspect the neurology of phone addiction is similar.
You might enjoy Irresistible by Adam Alter. The subtitle of the book is "The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked." Alter discusses technology addiction at length and it's similarities with substance and gambling addictions. Congratulations on sobriety!
Many thanks indeed. I think that palming off youngsters with phones as pacifiers will come to be seen in the near future as similar to handing them a packet of Marlboro. We will be shocked that past generations thought it perfectly acceptable, in the teeth of all the evidence (and frankly, despite the adults' own experience of how shockingly bad they felt after a few hours 'doom scrolling')
I am a Millennial that remembers life (and being a teen/young adult) before modern forms of social media. I don’t know anyone my age or older that wishes we had modern social media when we were younger. I think that is really saying something.
I would highly encourage people to view tech, but especially smartphones, as merely one item on a continuum and not inherently the “better” option simply because it is newer and faster. I have found that it is sometimes easier and cheaper to pay by check for some services. But it is rarely discussed. I added a home phone and it was surprisingly reasonably priced. Now I don’t need to worry about always having my cell phone out and available “just in case of emergency.”
I get magazines and a newspaper subscription and I am raising my kids to do the same. I want my kids to be paying customers of media, not the product. Online platforms are financially cheaper but that is because they are selling the highly specific marketing of YOU. This is very different than a magazine or newspaper where an advertiser markets to a general audience.
I would encourage others to do the same and have a variety of media in your home. I do have to make room in my budget for those things, but in my case I am supporting a small town newspaper that does a fantastic job of keeping the news articles objective. The news is straightforward, and the opinions are kept in the opinions section. That is so valuable! That is healthy to read! It respects boundaries of time, (arrives at set intervals, not 24/7) attention, and objectivity. They can do this because they aren’t striving for page views and virality online. They are selling a regular schedule of news coverage to customers in their local area. Find yourself some good magazines and a good small newspaper to support. It is an investment in your well-being. There is nothing like a cup of coffee and reading something that respects my attention span. You can still share it, too. Hand it to a friend and discuss it.
I am glad to see more people stepping back from social media. There are still plenty of ways around it. The older media still exists. We just need to intentionally invest in it because it requires more intentionality than social media.
Our kids are at a school that has gone phone-free, and the parents have been encouraged by teachers and the principal to be 'good weird' and keep our kids off social media.
What we discovered is that you don't have to get 100% of the families on board. If you can get even 20% or more of the kids to have no social media, the 'lock in' effect of needing it goes away. Too many kids aren't on social media for it to be the de facto communication platform.
Instead, the middle and high schoolers have an elaborate set of text streams. There's one for each sports team, for different classes, for sharing funny memes, etc. My 16 year old explained it to me and it's a riot of different conversations popping up and disappearing as needed, rather than a single 'content stream'.
The wildest part is how the teens interact with each other and with adults around them. They make eye contact, don't fidget for their phones, are happy to engage in conversation. It's wild.
This is an amazing post, Gabriela, and a fantastic resource for kids and adults alike to have an intentional path towards dialing back and even getting rid of social media. So happy for GenZers like yourself who have gotten tired of being used and abused by tech and social media companies. Bravo! My favorite line of your post, by the way: “If this is normal behavior, I wish to be strange.” Yes!!! 👏
I am deeply confident that we'll see this thinking spread through our generation and the next one -- these are our lives to live, and we will make the most of them! Thank you for the detailed steps; it motivates me to keep formalizing my self-experimentation on my digital habits too. I look forward to the full guide with Freya.
I do agree and would like to depart from social media. The problem is, as an independent musician, it seems almost impossible to not have a social media presence. Venues and collaborators expect you to be present, to advertise events (sadly it's also being used to measure your potential market value in followers). The fear for one like me is that you actually are invisible in the eyes of all the gatekeepers within the industry once you have left social media.
One frequently suggested method to maintain contact with the musical community is through a newsletter. I am working on building a newsletter through substack to promote concerts and releases, but a newsletter only reaches those who already have discovered my music. A newsletter does not help me to book shows, it does not make me appear in mailboxes of potential fans who have never heard of my songs. To leave social media seems existentially threatening for any aspiring artist who pursues a career.
I say "seems" because I believe this fear is an example of how social media puts pressure on us by offering a solution for a problem it has created itself. Nevertheless, the fear is real, the problem is real, and aspiring artists today have to deal with it, therefore they can't ignore it.
I believe that many creatives are aware that eventually the medium is the message. That algorithmic driven platforms like Instagram do not serve the artists as the reliable tool and support systems they promote themselves to be. Many creatives know and experience that every "content" created to promote their art is fuel for the platform. The sometimes highly potent "content" artists create actually contributes further to the doomscrolling crisis, draws curious minds in and keeps them hooked while simultaneously stealing the artist's time, distracting them and redirecting their focus on numbers rather than their artistic work (which eventually could lead to a bottle-neck-effect on art in general, but this is a topic for a whole dissertation). In the long term, every "content" is not a sustainable support for the artist, it mainly supports the platform: A post is a post is a post.
I personally believe it is worth it to sacrifice career chances in order to stop supporting this vicious cycle. I would not expect anyone in a similar position to share this sentiment. Everyone has to make this decision for themselves. As I see it, the destructive powers against many things I genuinely love are just too obvious to ignore. There even might be artists who would consider departing from social media as their responsibility, since art always has been the field of human experience where we expand our consciousness, while social media is built in a way that obstructs the view.
If you can offer practical advice for me and other artists in a similar predicament on how to leave social media – advice that is informed by the realities of the creative industries – I would be grateful. Maybe there is a way to depart from social media without having to abandon career chances.
A lot of the discourse surrounding social media is usually about times when it overtakes our social life, or times when it becomes addictive. However, I do feel like the push to quit these Big Bad Tech platforms can sometimes cause us to guilt ourselves for being present on them at all (after all, how are those against social media sending their message? Social media!)
I've tried to view my use on the platforms from a strictly business lens. While I hear talk about how content makes us a machine or how these are algorithms designed to mentally harm us, I've never personally felt that way when using them. In fact - I've only heard these sentiments when doomscrolling through social media!
I limit my platforms to only those essential to me. I also take regular days off and holiday breaks. I try to find local events in addition to online ones if there's anything particularly useful to me (i.e. local and online writing critique groups), mostly for the social aspects, as the value of said tools often can't be replaced. Viewing it as a secondary job has actually helped, because when turning things into to-do lists and the like, I can set social networking as a low priority and control my time spent on it. I also try to avoid following accounts or joining servers that aren't serving said networking.
If the platforms are starting to harm your health in a way you feel you can't offset, then deleting them might be the better way to go. That said, there's a lot of talk of "I shouldn't be on the platform because it's bad", "I shouldn't support this dystopian culture my generation lives in," "A lifestyle with technology is a destroyed mind," than can come more from a place of embarrassment over doing the "bad" thing than actual damage.
I remember feeling this way myself. I was spending a large number of hours on social media, building my network, but that big number meant I was one of "those" kids. I was talking to my i-r-l friends about my work on here - How dare it consume me?! I even recieved compliments on my writing and they made me feel... good? No, that's that fake evil social media, I shouldn't allow myself to enjoy those comments!
Then I stopped and realized that the act of being online wasn't harming my health as much as I made it out to be. Sure, I could sometimes stay up too late on Discord, but that's the same with staying up late reading or writing, or eating too much sugar one week in my life, things I can re-adust. Nobody calls a bookworm a book addict. Socials CAN certainly become more than a minor hiccup to someone, causing a serious drain on their mental health, but for some of us the noise about needing to quit actually becomes it's own social media trend we feel guilty about not following. I worry more about not looking cool to my fellow Substack writers for having a Discord server than my follower count on said server.
Gather multiple perspectives and make the best decision for yourself. I'm sure there are many other creatives with a different experience than my own. While the advice presented by this article wasn't what worked for me personally, it's wisdom that is going to resonate with many where that is the best path for them. But it's not impossible to do this in a healthy way, and you should make the decisions based on what's best for your own health and lifestyle. Quitting is perfectly valid, I just want to raise the point in case anyone reading might feel pressured to do so only out of guilt.
Gabriela, thank you for your beautiful piece of writing! I am beginning to detest all of this silliness (and really, it isn't all silliness; however, a lot of it is). Seeing a group of friends at a restaurant with their phones in their hands rather than communicating with one another is such a sad story! I once read that a couple were "talking" to each other over their phones, while sitting beside one another. Unbelievable times we are living in. Thank you for writing, for acting on this and for being such an integral part of the "system."
Born in '94, I'm the youngest of the millennials and this resonates with me. Starting in 2019 I began eliminating my social media presence until nothing remained. It took several years and I didn't start the process with the intention of getting off everything, it just happened like slowly toppling dominos. My phone usage was still problematic until last summer, so I switched to a flip phone by Sunbeam Wireless (a flip phone with some basic tools like Waze and 21st century tech like USBC charging and hotspot capabilities). I have been a flip phone evangelist ever since.
This is not only a terrific piece of work, but such a valuable resource for everyone working with adolescents. Next Wednesday I'm going to discuss this in class with my English students here in Germany. I just finished grading their essays on digitalization, the ban in Australia and online life - the theses and arguments leaned heavily in a direction that was critical of social media. For many this has become painfully obvious in retrospect as they look back at their younger self, and they regret having been pulled into the vortex of TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat. I'm sure they'll value this article - thank you!!
Isn't Substack social media? Because if it is social media, you really haven't ditched your social media habit, you've just redirected it to a new platform.
What is the fundamental difference between Substack and Facebook? I can post my thoughts, pictures, memes, etc. on both platforms. I can connect with "friends" on both platforms. I can "chat" with others on the platform. I can follow other, interesting people or build a following of my own. They both use an algorithm to feed me content. I can spend hours scrolling content on both. They both give me a dopamine hit when someone likes something I posted.
Why is Substack better than the other social media platforms, if it is? There's far less content on Substack than other platforms so it provides some friction to constant outrage posting. But that might not be the case forever as Substack's popularity grows. Substack content is more intellectually diverse and interesting, but that's probably more the result of how I've curated my content. I've certainly discovered the "progressive" corner of Substack and it's full of faux outrage, vitriol, hatred, and, oddly, dick pics.
Social media isn't going away. We need to develop a better system to categorize social media rather than one big bucket. There's certainly some that produce and addictive brain rot. But there are some like Substack that don't seem to do that. I'd argue that the big platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit have a decidedly illiberal culture that is enforced by the platform itself. Substack has a liberal (in the true sense, not the pejorative sense) culture that is enforced by the platform. I think the more the on-line culture embraces a culture of free expression, the less toxic it is.
This piece profoundly resonated with me as someone (I'm at the tail end of Millennial, now at the ripe age of 30) who has been appstinent for over a decade. Growing up in a low-tech environment surrounded by biodiversity in South India, I felt ill-equipped to adopt a digital native lifestyle when I moved to Berlin in my late teens. There was little to no guidance and support given to navigate the complex relationship between social media and my teenage self. I chose to appstain because I knew the habits I would form would persist throughout my 20's and I didn't trust myself to practice as much self-control and regulation. Now, years later, I'm relieved to see movements like these. More importantly, I celebrate how they're being led by the youth — someone like Gabriela, who is driven by her commitment to provide an additional option ([] None of the above); in this case, the option to not engage. Thank you for all your work, Gabriela, we appreciate you.
Thank you for writing this, Gabriella! I am also part of Gen Z, I am 24, and I have been working towards my own form of "appstinace" for the last year. I don't forsee myself ever completely deleting my accounts, but I have already started the process of deleting accounts I don't use/my presence off platforms I don't care for.
Currently, I have screen limits on my phone for social media apps, which reminds me that I am not supposed to open them before I am able to access the content. I have the same for my email and probably soon substack as well. Using screen limits, I have decreased my use of Facebook/IG/YT shorts (my favorite platforms) demonstrably. I think I'm down to a combined 2 hours maximum per day, from the 6+ I had during the pandemic.
I recently saw a girl that quit socials post in a group chat I am in that she has a schedule for her free time each day. Monday's might be crocheting and tv, Tuesdays reading, Wednesdays writing, etc. As a highly to-do list oriented person, it never crossed my mind to try that. A tip that might be helpful to share with your clients and friends!
Absolutely fantastic. Every detail of this so important right now. And the best most poignant and simple phrase is, “social media is optional.” I thought only people over 40 knew this. We all existed and had fun active childhoods without any of this, without caller id even!! I would love to see a sweeping movement of people just abandoning social media. Just realizing that they are outsourcing their power for free to tech companies who are exploiting them. After reading her experience I have hope again for the future.
Largely speaking, I delayed access to social media until I was 18, skipping it during high school. This definitely helped me a lot, and I found it rarely separated me from my peers. Not having a phone did make it harder to keep in touch... But most people didn't try to speak through social media platforms. I was already having trouble finding friends - If those friends were obsessed with the Twitter doomscroll (as they were), they probably weren't the right friends.
I've since started an active presence thanks to my career. Being a writer and aspiring author, I have to market my articles and short stories somehow. I wouldn't have started using them if it weren't for business reasons, and I try to limit the number of platforms I'm on (though branching out has proven itself a requirement for the type of content I wish to produce). Still, I think leaving these platforms alone until I was older and had a more practical reason for them helped me set healthy boundaries. I'd love to speak more on those if people are curious.
I am particularly interested in your discussion of appstinence (good word!) vs. moderate use.
It mirrors my experience with alcohol, and I think that of many other heavy substance users - that is, moderation for me is simply not a viable option.
It is as if the steady increase in use over time resulted in a ratchet that never releases, or resets, but can only go upward. Even after months of zero alcohol intake, when I had grown convinced I could now safely have a drink or two, I either 'white knuckled' the day to when I could sink a drink, or returned to peak use within as little as 48 hours.
Wrestling with that very strong impulse - overwhelmingly strong, ultimately - was far harder than deciding to rule out alcohol in perpetuity. I believe after a certain point, your brain is rewired in such a way that there is no 'safe' amount.
But if you approach abstinence in the right way, It stops it being even a question in your mind - and when you notice you aren't looking at the bottles in the supermarket, or not thinking twice about getting a tea rather than a beer, you feel liberated, not deprived. Grateful that you are the master of your life again, and that your self-respect is not under permanent threat. I have been booze-free for 12 months. Long may it last.
I am no expert, but I suspect the neurology of phone addiction is similar.
You might enjoy Irresistible by Adam Alter. The subtitle of the book is "The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked." Alter discusses technology addiction at length and it's similarities with substance and gambling addictions. Congratulations on sobriety!
Many thanks indeed. I think that palming off youngsters with phones as pacifiers will come to be seen in the near future as similar to handing them a packet of Marlboro. We will be shocked that past generations thought it perfectly acceptable, in the teeth of all the evidence (and frankly, despite the adults' own experience of how shockingly bad they felt after a few hours 'doom scrolling')
I am a Millennial that remembers life (and being a teen/young adult) before modern forms of social media. I don’t know anyone my age or older that wishes we had modern social media when we were younger. I think that is really saying something.
I would highly encourage people to view tech, but especially smartphones, as merely one item on a continuum and not inherently the “better” option simply because it is newer and faster. I have found that it is sometimes easier and cheaper to pay by check for some services. But it is rarely discussed. I added a home phone and it was surprisingly reasonably priced. Now I don’t need to worry about always having my cell phone out and available “just in case of emergency.”
I get magazines and a newspaper subscription and I am raising my kids to do the same. I want my kids to be paying customers of media, not the product. Online platforms are financially cheaper but that is because they are selling the highly specific marketing of YOU. This is very different than a magazine or newspaper where an advertiser markets to a general audience.
I would encourage others to do the same and have a variety of media in your home. I do have to make room in my budget for those things, but in my case I am supporting a small town newspaper that does a fantastic job of keeping the news articles objective. The news is straightforward, and the opinions are kept in the opinions section. That is so valuable! That is healthy to read! It respects boundaries of time, (arrives at set intervals, not 24/7) attention, and objectivity. They can do this because they aren’t striving for page views and virality online. They are selling a regular schedule of news coverage to customers in their local area. Find yourself some good magazines and a good small newspaper to support. It is an investment in your well-being. There is nothing like a cup of coffee and reading something that respects my attention span. You can still share it, too. Hand it to a friend and discuss it.
I am glad to see more people stepping back from social media. There are still plenty of ways around it. The older media still exists. We just need to intentionally invest in it because it requires more intentionality than social media.
This is absolutely true.
Our kids are at a school that has gone phone-free, and the parents have been encouraged by teachers and the principal to be 'good weird' and keep our kids off social media.
What we discovered is that you don't have to get 100% of the families on board. If you can get even 20% or more of the kids to have no social media, the 'lock in' effect of needing it goes away. Too many kids aren't on social media for it to be the de facto communication platform.
Instead, the middle and high schoolers have an elaborate set of text streams. There's one for each sports team, for different classes, for sharing funny memes, etc. My 16 year old explained it to me and it's a riot of different conversations popping up and disappearing as needed, rather than a single 'content stream'.
The wildest part is how the teens interact with each other and with adults around them. They make eye contact, don't fidget for their phones, are happy to engage in conversation. It's wild.
This is an amazing post, Gabriela, and a fantastic resource for kids and adults alike to have an intentional path towards dialing back and even getting rid of social media. So happy for GenZers like yourself who have gotten tired of being used and abused by tech and social media companies. Bravo! My favorite line of your post, by the way: “If this is normal behavior, I wish to be strange.” Yes!!! 👏
I am deeply confident that we'll see this thinking spread through our generation and the next one -- these are our lives to live, and we will make the most of them! Thank you for the detailed steps; it motivates me to keep formalizing my self-experimentation on my digital habits too. I look forward to the full guide with Freya.
Keep fighting, Gabriela.
I do agree and would like to depart from social media. The problem is, as an independent musician, it seems almost impossible to not have a social media presence. Venues and collaborators expect you to be present, to advertise events (sadly it's also being used to measure your potential market value in followers). The fear for one like me is that you actually are invisible in the eyes of all the gatekeepers within the industry once you have left social media.
One frequently suggested method to maintain contact with the musical community is through a newsletter. I am working on building a newsletter through substack to promote concerts and releases, but a newsletter only reaches those who already have discovered my music. A newsletter does not help me to book shows, it does not make me appear in mailboxes of potential fans who have never heard of my songs. To leave social media seems existentially threatening for any aspiring artist who pursues a career.
I say "seems" because I believe this fear is an example of how social media puts pressure on us by offering a solution for a problem it has created itself. Nevertheless, the fear is real, the problem is real, and aspiring artists today have to deal with it, therefore they can't ignore it.
I believe that many creatives are aware that eventually the medium is the message. That algorithmic driven platforms like Instagram do not serve the artists as the reliable tool and support systems they promote themselves to be. Many creatives know and experience that every "content" created to promote their art is fuel for the platform. The sometimes highly potent "content" artists create actually contributes further to the doomscrolling crisis, draws curious minds in and keeps them hooked while simultaneously stealing the artist's time, distracting them and redirecting their focus on numbers rather than their artistic work (which eventually could lead to a bottle-neck-effect on art in general, but this is a topic for a whole dissertation). In the long term, every "content" is not a sustainable support for the artist, it mainly supports the platform: A post is a post is a post.
I personally believe it is worth it to sacrifice career chances in order to stop supporting this vicious cycle. I would not expect anyone in a similar position to share this sentiment. Everyone has to make this decision for themselves. As I see it, the destructive powers against many things I genuinely love are just too obvious to ignore. There even might be artists who would consider departing from social media as their responsibility, since art always has been the field of human experience where we expand our consciousness, while social media is built in a way that obstructs the view.
If you can offer practical advice for me and other artists in a similar predicament on how to leave social media – advice that is informed by the realities of the creative industries – I would be grateful. Maybe there is a way to depart from social media without having to abandon career chances.
Thank you.
I'm in the same boat!
A lot of the discourse surrounding social media is usually about times when it overtakes our social life, or times when it becomes addictive. However, I do feel like the push to quit these Big Bad Tech platforms can sometimes cause us to guilt ourselves for being present on them at all (after all, how are those against social media sending their message? Social media!)
I've tried to view my use on the platforms from a strictly business lens. While I hear talk about how content makes us a machine or how these are algorithms designed to mentally harm us, I've never personally felt that way when using them. In fact - I've only heard these sentiments when doomscrolling through social media!
I limit my platforms to only those essential to me. I also take regular days off and holiday breaks. I try to find local events in addition to online ones if there's anything particularly useful to me (i.e. local and online writing critique groups), mostly for the social aspects, as the value of said tools often can't be replaced. Viewing it as a secondary job has actually helped, because when turning things into to-do lists and the like, I can set social networking as a low priority and control my time spent on it. I also try to avoid following accounts or joining servers that aren't serving said networking.
If the platforms are starting to harm your health in a way you feel you can't offset, then deleting them might be the better way to go. That said, there's a lot of talk of "I shouldn't be on the platform because it's bad", "I shouldn't support this dystopian culture my generation lives in," "A lifestyle with technology is a destroyed mind," than can come more from a place of embarrassment over doing the "bad" thing than actual damage.
I remember feeling this way myself. I was spending a large number of hours on social media, building my network, but that big number meant I was one of "those" kids. I was talking to my i-r-l friends about my work on here - How dare it consume me?! I even recieved compliments on my writing and they made me feel... good? No, that's that fake evil social media, I shouldn't allow myself to enjoy those comments!
Then I stopped and realized that the act of being online wasn't harming my health as much as I made it out to be. Sure, I could sometimes stay up too late on Discord, but that's the same with staying up late reading or writing, or eating too much sugar one week in my life, things I can re-adust. Nobody calls a bookworm a book addict. Socials CAN certainly become more than a minor hiccup to someone, causing a serious drain on their mental health, but for some of us the noise about needing to quit actually becomes it's own social media trend we feel guilty about not following. I worry more about not looking cool to my fellow Substack writers for having a Discord server than my follower count on said server.
Gather multiple perspectives and make the best decision for yourself. I'm sure there are many other creatives with a different experience than my own. While the advice presented by this article wasn't what worked for me personally, it's wisdom that is going to resonate with many where that is the best path for them. But it's not impossible to do this in a healthy way, and you should make the decisions based on what's best for your own health and lifestyle. Quitting is perfectly valid, I just want to raise the point in case anyone reading might feel pressured to do so only out of guilt.
Your young age and deep involvement also inspire me; you are a great role model for others to follow.
Gabriela, thank you for your beautiful piece of writing! I am beginning to detest all of this silliness (and really, it isn't all silliness; however, a lot of it is). Seeing a group of friends at a restaurant with their phones in their hands rather than communicating with one another is such a sad story! I once read that a couple were "talking" to each other over their phones, while sitting beside one another. Unbelievable times we are living in. Thank you for writing, for acting on this and for being such an integral part of the "system."
Born in '94, I'm the youngest of the millennials and this resonates with me. Starting in 2019 I began eliminating my social media presence until nothing remained. It took several years and I didn't start the process with the intention of getting off everything, it just happened like slowly toppling dominos. My phone usage was still problematic until last summer, so I switched to a flip phone by Sunbeam Wireless (a flip phone with some basic tools like Waze and 21st century tech like USBC charging and hotspot capabilities). I have been a flip phone evangelist ever since.
This is not only a terrific piece of work, but such a valuable resource for everyone working with adolescents. Next Wednesday I'm going to discuss this in class with my English students here in Germany. I just finished grading their essays on digitalization, the ban in Australia and online life - the theses and arguments leaned heavily in a direction that was critical of social media. For many this has become painfully obvious in retrospect as they look back at their younger self, and they regret having been pulled into the vortex of TikTok, Instagram and Snapchat. I'm sure they'll value this article - thank you!!
Isn't Substack social media? Because if it is social media, you really haven't ditched your social media habit, you've just redirected it to a new platform.
What is the fundamental difference between Substack and Facebook? I can post my thoughts, pictures, memes, etc. on both platforms. I can connect with "friends" on both platforms. I can "chat" with others on the platform. I can follow other, interesting people or build a following of my own. They both use an algorithm to feed me content. I can spend hours scrolling content on both. They both give me a dopamine hit when someone likes something I posted.
Why is Substack better than the other social media platforms, if it is? There's far less content on Substack than other platforms so it provides some friction to constant outrage posting. But that might not be the case forever as Substack's popularity grows. Substack content is more intellectually diverse and interesting, but that's probably more the result of how I've curated my content. I've certainly discovered the "progressive" corner of Substack and it's full of faux outrage, vitriol, hatred, and, oddly, dick pics.
Social media isn't going away. We need to develop a better system to categorize social media rather than one big bucket. There's certainly some that produce and addictive brain rot. But there are some like Substack that don't seem to do that. I'd argue that the big platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit have a decidedly illiberal culture that is enforced by the platform itself. Substack has a liberal (in the true sense, not the pejorative sense) culture that is enforced by the platform. I think the more the on-line culture embraces a culture of free expression, the less toxic it is.
This is great! Now, let's focus on how to break the cycle for the younger generations, so they can be healthier.
This piece profoundly resonated with me as someone (I'm at the tail end of Millennial, now at the ripe age of 30) who has been appstinent for over a decade. Growing up in a low-tech environment surrounded by biodiversity in South India, I felt ill-equipped to adopt a digital native lifestyle when I moved to Berlin in my late teens. There was little to no guidance and support given to navigate the complex relationship between social media and my teenage self. I chose to appstain because I knew the habits I would form would persist throughout my 20's and I didn't trust myself to practice as much self-control and regulation. Now, years later, I'm relieved to see movements like these. More importantly, I celebrate how they're being led by the youth — someone like Gabriela, who is driven by her commitment to provide an additional option ([] None of the above); in this case, the option to not engage. Thank you for all your work, Gabriela, we appreciate you.
Thank you for writing this, Gabriella! I am also part of Gen Z, I am 24, and I have been working towards my own form of "appstinace" for the last year. I don't forsee myself ever completely deleting my accounts, but I have already started the process of deleting accounts I don't use/my presence off platforms I don't care for.
Currently, I have screen limits on my phone for social media apps, which reminds me that I am not supposed to open them before I am able to access the content. I have the same for my email and probably soon substack as well. Using screen limits, I have decreased my use of Facebook/IG/YT shorts (my favorite platforms) demonstrably. I think I'm down to a combined 2 hours maximum per day, from the 6+ I had during the pandemic.
I recently saw a girl that quit socials post in a group chat I am in that she has a schedule for her free time each day. Monday's might be crocheting and tv, Tuesdays reading, Wednesdays writing, etc. As a highly to-do list oriented person, it never crossed my mind to try that. A tip that might be helpful to share with your clients and friends!
Thanks again :)
Absolutely fantastic. Every detail of this so important right now. And the best most poignant and simple phrase is, “social media is optional.” I thought only people over 40 knew this. We all existed and had fun active childhoods without any of this, without caller id even!! I would love to see a sweeping movement of people just abandoning social media. Just realizing that they are outsourcing their power for free to tech companies who are exploiting them. After reading her experience I have hope again for the future.
Wise advice, thank you for this post!
Largely speaking, I delayed access to social media until I was 18, skipping it during high school. This definitely helped me a lot, and I found it rarely separated me from my peers. Not having a phone did make it harder to keep in touch... But most people didn't try to speak through social media platforms. I was already having trouble finding friends - If those friends were obsessed with the Twitter doomscroll (as they were), they probably weren't the right friends.
I've since started an active presence thanks to my career. Being a writer and aspiring author, I have to market my articles and short stories somehow. I wouldn't have started using them if it weren't for business reasons, and I try to limit the number of platforms I'm on (though branching out has proven itself a requirement for the type of content I wish to produce). Still, I think leaving these platforms alone until I was older and had a more practical reason for them helped me set healthy boundaries. I'd love to speak more on those if people are curious.