Why I’m off social media

The allure of scrolling through my phone isn’t as appealing to me now, but there was a time when I could not resist.

The temptation to do so persisted throughout the in-betweens of my days, but it was especially hard to resist during mornings. Back then, it was easy for me to lie still for seconds, minutes—sometimes even hours—watching the world unfold in perfectly curated montages of girls my age hiking Machu Picchu; in videos of self-taught yoga gurus showing off their unbelievably thin bodies; in recorded speeches of Ivy League valedictorians echoing each other and their predecessors. But then I’d be interrupted by quakes from my growling stomach, or the sweat forming on my feet—still clad in sleep socks—only to realize I’d already watched everyone literally do everything humanly possible before I had even gotten out of bed to eat breakfast.

Social media, to put it briefly, used to be a big part of my life. Not unlike many of my peers, I made my Facebook account during my formative years—only bypassing Facebook’s “18 and above only” rule by switching my birth year to that of an actual adult. It saw me through gap-toothed years. My zit-faced era. Numerous birthday parties, tantrums, and half-sipped milk tea cups.

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When Facebook ceased to be trendy for my generation, I joined the great migration to Instagram and X (formerly Twitter)—and eventually, TikTok. There, the cycle continued.

These days it seems like an overwhelming number of people are eager to add snippets of their daily lives to the bottomless pit of social media feeds. I, however, have stopped.

In recent years, all the aspects of social media I love seem to have grown barren. The spontaneity. The messiness, no matter how ugly. The unfaltering, withstanding atmosphere of authenticity and genuine community. In lieu of cheesy selfies, newfound quotes, and adorably embarrassing dance numbers, the majority of my feed now seems to be polluted by caricatures of stylized lives and counterfeit displays of productivity and effortlessness. Long gone are the days when spending time online lacked the pressure to inhale and exhale trendy and marketable content, if only to leave traces of ourselves in the digital world.

Far too many times, I’ve found myself wanting to do the same things that have garnered fame and admiration for the people I follow online—I know I am not alone in this. Social media can often be an echo chamber. And so you find yourself switching out your skinny jeans for wide-leg ones, reading the same books as everyone else, tailoring your ideas to be more conventional, wanting to brag about coveted internships and effortless academic success, dreaming about designer bags, being scared of failure, and trying to be more disciplined purely in the name of self-development and erasing your flaws.

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Only when you’re in too deep will you realize how much of yourself you have lost—your childhood dreams have been traded in for trendier goals, your lexicon updated only by internet buzzwords, and your life’s purpose indistinguishable from everyone else’s.

Perhaps it can be said that resistance to these internet fashions (in both the metaphorical and actual sense) can be attributed to some stronger sense of self-discipline, but their effect on impressionable young minds—not unlike mine—is undeniable. When did we ever start to let this many people tell us what to buy, how to live our lives, how to look, and pressure us to do more, past the point of burnout, of unjustified exhaustion, and into a place that breeds unrealistic expectations?

I am turning 21 this year, and I find that I have lost far too much valuable time—time that I could have spent honing my talents and not bowing to popular opinion—scrolling through an endless stream of slop and idealized images of what life should be.

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Staying off social media has been a challenge, especially when everyone around you seems unwilling to let go. It is a difficult balance to retreat from the poisons of the digital world without feeling like you’re severing connections from some of your loved ones.

But until the state of social media returns to that of its past—where influence rarely matters, and your existence is far more valued than any image you feel the need to portray—I’m more than happy to stay off my phone, to live life more unconventionally, to not let whoever decide what is fashionable and what is not, away from dopamine-induced pleasures and toward places that are more real, more forgiving, and more tolerating of humanness and imperfections.

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Sofia Alexy Ubaldo, 20, is a second-year chemical engineering student at the University of the Philippines Diliman.