Facebook Friends Don’t Count
My Year Without Social Media
Like many new parents today, when my kids were babies I was posting pics of them several times a week online. It was part of the fun of the day to stay up late after a fun day out of getting some great shots in and carefully select which photos I would spam my friends with that day. Trying to come up with witty captions was always fun, too.
I’d publish my pics to Facebook and Instagram and then sit back to wait for the notifications to roll in. And, of course, they always did. Each ding of my phone provided a quick shot of dopamine. It could be euphoric.
Throughout the hectic mornings, I’d always find time to peek at my phone every now and then to check my social media accounts. I’d comment and like friends’ cute photos and relish their comments on mine. I started using social media back in the Myspace era. I’ve never gotten around to getting on Twitter or TikTok; Facebook and Instagram were my poisons of choice.
Needless to say, it was a pretty large and very consistent part of my life for years, as it is for many. “Today around seven-in-ten Americans use social media to connect with one another, engage with news content, share information and entertain themselves” (“Social Media Fact Sheet”). In fact, “More than half of the world now uses social media (58.4%)….[and] The average daily time spent using social media is 2h 27m” (Chaffey).
Now, we’ve all heard that social media can have negative effects on many regular users. Studies have shown that daily exposure to the eternal scroll and snap-judgments that are Facebook and Instagram can cause depression and other mental health issues (Nittle).
I feel that, personally, social media was something that was just fun for me for many years and I don’t feel that it damaged my mental health while regularly using it…at least, not for the majority of the years I used it.
Last year, I found myself feeling incredibly down for a couple of weeks before my birthday. I’ve struggled with depression and anxiety in recent years so it’s not exactly weird for me to feel sad for no apparent reason…but, this was something different.
It was kind of a big birthday. 35. I’d no longer be in my early thirties.
It was one thing to be an early thirty-something trying to eke out a new life post-divorce while struggling with failing mental health, single parenthood, a job I was growing to despise, and no prospects on the dating horizon to speak of…not to mention the entire global pandemic. But now I was about to become a mid-thirty-something with all of these short-comings. I’d hyperventilate just thinking about it.
It was an age where people are supposed to have their shit together. Okay, I’m well aware many people do not have their shit together at the ripe old age of 35. I knew I could certainly have it much worse. I was very lucky to be in decent physical health and for my loved ones to also be in decent physical health. I guess what I was really feeling was that I always thought I’d have my life together by this age.
Now it was fast approaching and still nothing seemed to make sense. I needed a new perspective. I went to the first source I usually go to when I’m in need of urgent spiritual and intellectual guidance — the convenient oracle of Google.
Two remedies resounded through the many sites I desperately scrolled through:
- ) Get off of social media. Like, yesterday. And,
2.) Spend more time with friends and loved ones.
I didn’t really trust any of the sites I looked at to know me well enough to know the solution to my current birthday-related sadness. I took some notes and then continued to mourn my youth while dreading my fast-approaching birthday.
I tried journaling it out. What specifically was the problem at heart here? I thought about what I usually like about my birthday; being with family, hearing from my friends, celebrating with food, all the well wishes on Facebook…all the well wishes on Facebook.
Suddenly the splinter in my heart came to light like a candle on a cake and I understood. I had about 300 friends on Facebook. As anyone who’s familiar with it is well aware, Facebook alerts everyone on your friends list to your birthday every year (if you’ve entered your birth date into your account) and reminds you to wish them a happy birthday via a post on their page. I would get hundreds of “Happy Birthdays”, gifs, and private messages every year on both Facebook and Instagram. Close friends would text or call.
I decided to do a little experiment. I was four days out from my birthday. Something about all the hundreds of Happy Birthday messages every year was seriously bugging me. It was all just so fake. Now just to be clear, no, I am not some kind of egomaniac who was upset that hundreds of busy people all leading their own lives might not independently remember my birthday each year without the helping hand of Facebook. That wasn’t the problem. I certainly had no idea when the majority of my social media friends’ birthdays were each year. Of course, when birthday notifications popped up on the app I always shot friends a quick birthday message. It was polite. I mean, we live in a society.
My Facebook friends list consisted mainly of relatives, coworkers, old friends from college, high school, and even elementary school. Some of these people, my coworkers, I saw regularly in real life. But the friends from elementary and a good number of the college friends were people I hadn’t spoken to in years if not decades. Our only communication to speak of was wishing one another a mindless “happy birthday” each year thanks to Facebook’s push and occasionally liking or commenting on each other’s photos.
Maybe I knew what their kids looked like and all about the recent reno they’d done to their kitchen. But, was that friendship? Or was it just something oddly personal and extremely impersonal at the same time? If I were to see many of these people walking down the opposite side of the street from me, I’d feel very weird about waving and yelling over to them. We weren’t actually friends. We were strangers standing in such a long and boring line that we started digging into our wallets and sharing school photos of our kids with each other while chatting to kill time. This is what I mean when I say it was fake. Most of the social media “friends” I had were not real friends.
My stomach turned at the thought of another year of reviewing all of the mindless birthday messages from essential strangers to my life. I wanted to live deeper. I wanted to pour my energy into strengthening real life relationships with the friends I was close with rather than scattering my limited social energy across a hundred kid and pet photos every single day posted by people I barely even knew anymore.
So, the experiment began. Four days before my 35th birthday I deleted my Facebook and Instagram accounts.
On my birthday I breathed a sigh of relief when I blew out my candles. No false wishes from strangers this year. No time wasted scrolling through the daily highlight reels of passers-by in my life. The anchor of sadness I’d been fighting against for the last couple of weeks finally lifted.
Here it is one year later. I feel so much better without constantly comparing myself to everyone else every single day online. I’ve enjoyed stronger and more fulfilling friendships with loved ones. I open my laptop to read or write and not to feel like a voyeur in the lives of people I last saw in fourth grade.
To each their own, of course. For me, deleting my accounts gave me freedom and relief from the largely imaginary pressure of feeling I needed to compete with others in some kind of life pageant.
Birthday wish: granted.
Works Cited
Chaffey, Dave. “Global Media Statistics Research Summary 2022.” Smart Insights. 29 Mar 2022. Accessed 01 May 2022. https://www.smartinsights.com/social-media-marketing/social-media-strategy/new-global-social-media-research/.
Nittle, Nadra. “How Does Social Media Play a Role in Depression?” Verywell Mind. 01 Jul 2021. Accessed 01 May 2022. https://www.verywellmind.com/social-media-and-depression-5085354#:~:text=Studies%20also%20indicate%20that%20social,or%20worsen%20their%20depression%20symptoms.
“Social Media Fact Sheet.” Pew Research Center. 07 Apr 2021. Accessed 01 May 2022. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/social-media/.
