best revenge is your peace

My friends and family often ask me why and how I pulled away from social media, so let's get into it. Maybe you'll find it useful.

Friendly disclaimer: this is an assessment of my own social media use and not intended as a critique of anyone else’s. Thank you for reading.

My mother tells a story of a small girl who cried her guts out all weekend. Woebegone, left with her father and older sister, she cried so much that when said mother returned from a weekend abroad (a trip to Europe for her brother’s wedding) she was greeted in the airport by a weary and worn-out husband and this forlorn toddler - hair plastered to her face like she’d been sweating profusely for days on end; a ghastly, bedraggled countenance and the soul of a deflated car-dealership-tube man. The eldest sibling reportedly bemoaned:

"Mum! It was so embarrassing. Ria didn't stop crying all weekend."

A grim case of separation anxiety, I guess. I have zero memory of that particular incident, I do however remember an earlier time. A core memory. It’s hazy. The scenes come to me as still images, but with small flashes of movement – a bit like an iPhone photograph in live mode. I see adults sitting in rows on either side of a draughty portacabin classroom. They are separated by an empty, daunting aisle which might as well be the Child Catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. I see other small children ushered down this gangplank, whilst teachers wait at the far end. I see myself letting go of my mother’s hand, whimpering my way up the aisle on the very first day of primary school. A baby pink coat splashes into vision, ethereal and confusing. Then comes the racing heart of this memory — my hand slips out of my mother’s hand. In my mind, the growing space between them has a magnetic energy, a force akin to the spin and pull of a yoyo. The moment is alien and yet I have no choice but to walk away from her and towards the stranger up ahead of me. No one has explained why I have to do it or what it means – I just do it.

To me, this is social media – an untethering. We physically remove ourselves from the people in our immediate orbit; from the present moment, as if real life is immutable.

My journey towards “appstinence" (a phrase coined by twenty-three year old Gabriela Nguyen in an essay written for Jonathan Haidt’s Substack which focuses on the rise of the smartphone and the impact of social media) has been a messy, muddy excavation of my deepest fears and where they come from. It has taken me years (YEARS! I am throwing my hands up in despair) to sit in peaceful coexistence with these platforms, and reader, I’m still not entirely there. But, I’d like to pull you into the trench for a moment to show you what I found.

Who was I?

In the Myspace and early Facebook years I was the archetypal 'Look At My Life'-er. Every holiday album was uploaded with try-hard captions and carefully planned, posed photos. Mindless, incessant, needy. If I had troubles, and boy did I, no one would ever have guessed. It’s the twisted paradox of social media – every post and ‘like’ is, in fact, inherently anti-social. We don’t talk to each other; we talk at each other. ‘Likes’ have become a proxy for actual connection.

Instagram and Twitter came along, and, on Instagram particularly, I embraced the zeitgeist. I gobbled up all the content, a voracious little Pac-Man, and then vomited up my own version of it. And when I first joined Twitter (I'm aghast thinking about it), unable to navigate the performativity I passively joined in. I felt grim and unmoored. I didn’t have the time or will to post witty and pithy statements every half an hour, so I concluded that I was doing life wrongly. You’ll be doing it right when you hit quadruple-digit followers, Ria. I scrolled endlessly, consuming the toxicity, the opinions, the snark, the achievement. It’ll be a good day when you get your own PERSONAL NEWS moment, Ria.

I saw, as I’m sure many others do, how Twitter replicated real-word hierarchies and inequalities, and how people flexed influence for their own gain, and sometimes to the detriment of others. #BeKind felt anathema in the digital space. There is nothing kind about constantly needing to share every aspect of our lives, if anything it belies a degree of cruelty. Dan Harris (who changed my life through meditation) is a former ABC News anchor and founder of the meditation app Ten Per Cent Happier (his full time home is now Substack, by the way.) He calls social media the “stock market of me.” I wanted to sell up. But, I didn’t know how. I felt stuck.

What changed?

About five years ago, I finally relented and properly acknowledged that none of these platforms made me feel good. There was no epiphanous moment, I simply became incrementally more aware of the feeling of a balloon slowly expanding in my chest, the pressure thwacking at my ribcage whenever I was scrolling on a platform. I thought it imprudent to ignore. A good friend recommended Johann Hari’s Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention and it instigated the change I needed. I started small (and failed thousands of times – still do) by resisting the urge to look at social media. Every time I reached for my phone to tap on one of the apps I visualised interrupting a sequence of chemical reactions in my brain. I kept doing this – succeeding then failing; succeeding then failing – until the craving weakened significantly. I still do it. I say aloud to myself Nope. You don’t need to look.

In my previous Substack essay I described social media as a long fingered shadow stealing my time and self-esteem – me hollowing as its burlap sack fattened. So, the next step in my process was redefining my priorities. I acknowledged that I didn't want to hemorrhage time and effort on growing a following and being relatable and being a slave to the algorithm by putting HOURS into “building my brand.” I wanted that time for other life engagements and I wanted social media out of my brain. At that point it felt an insidious part of too much of my thinking. I wanted to expend my energy on my family, friends, travel, books – literally anything else. Have you ever been caught up in a moment (at a dinner, on a walk, on holiday, at a party) but actually been completely inside your head writing a post about it? I wanted to stop detaching joy from the present; obediently handing it over to the long-fingered shadow, and instead feel the exuberance of IRL for its own merit.

One of my favourite memories is walking along the beach with my sister in our hometown, and telling her that our Dad had crushed salt and vinegar crisps onto his spaghetti bolognese the night before, much to Mum’s exasperation. The wind had a cheeky howl on it and the Atlantic Ocean was grey and fierce in my peripheral vision. Right then my sister, in response to my story, pulled a face that has been the source of many a dopamine hit ever since. Her eyes widened to the size of giant milk chocolate buttons and her mouth made an ‘O’ shape before clamping inwards, just as a child’s does when it has heard something eye-popping, like a secret or a swear word. Such joy to be found in the stifling wind, the dog berserk on the sand, the unbridled engagement of my own flesh and blood. I was acutely reminded that I wanted millions more of these moments; that I wanted to try at least to just. be. present.

What did I do?

1. DIG

Figure out what's underneath the need to scroll/post:

What will happen if I don’t scroll on X today? How do I feel when I’m not watching Insta stories? For whom am I posting this? I’d highly recommend meditation — it creates space to figure this stuff out.

2. VALUES

What are your values? Define them then put them to work. For example, I tend to post about issues going under the radar (a lot of that relates to the stories I cover at work.) I am obsessed with music and film, so I might occasionally post about new albums or films or programmes I’ve watched that others might be interested in. I also get a huge amount of joy from celebrating my family and friends, and I hope they in turn feel loved and seen, so the odd birthday post is a fave. Occasionally, if I’ve done something I’m really proud about it I don’t mind plastering my mug on the grid. But, none of the above feels inherently about me and my life, and that works perfectly with how I aim to engage.

3. LET GO

I’m learning to post and let go. I don’t check back to see who has liked a post – I don’t need to because I haven’t posted in the hope that said post will get five or thirty or ninety hearts. It will reach whomever it needs to reach. If you’re posting for reasons that align with your own value system you won’t care so much about the outcome.

4. GRATITUDE

Some people will groan at this one. THE SCIENCE BACKS IT, THOUGH. I find that getting comfortable with the positive aspects of my day is an antidote to needing to share. I make a mental list of five things before I go to sleep. These moments are my dopamine hit.

5. DON’T SCROLL

Do you need to scroll/watch stories? For ages I made up all sorts of crazy reasons to convince myself that I HAD to scroll. I don’t need to. Not for anything. (There are a handful of journalists and writers whose work I love so I routinely google them to check for their newest work.) Scrolling also dumps on point number four — comparison is the thief of joy etc.

6. DELETE

Delete the apps- do you need them all the time? I went cold turkey with TikTok and never looked back. I download X and Instagram sporadically. Last week I deactivated my Facebook account too.

7. SHARE

I still share certain things with family and friends who will receive my experiences with care and respect. I take hundreds of photos and when I want to remember those times I share them directly with the person who was involved. It’s fun. A hit of pure joy without any of the anxieties that come with social media engagement.

the work continues

At the end of 2024, I posted a selection of my favourite photographs/things from the year gone. I mulled it over beforehand and squared off my reasons – I enjoy taking photographs and wanted to share them in case they reached others who appreciate the same kind of style. The carousel also contained a few landscape photos from holidays (which I told myself was also “just photography”) plus some snaps of me. But, over the next couple of days I felt uncomfortable with what I’d shared. I poked around inside my head and realised that if I saw that post I might think this person is doing one of those annoying round up of the year posts. It wasn’t that I was overly bothered by what others might think, it just didn’t fit with how I try to contribute to the platform. My point is, I’m still not where I’d like to be but I will keep trying.

Of course, we are lured ever deeper into platforms (think Threads) and they’re multiplying (think Bluesky.) It reminds me of the following line from Beyoncé’s American Requiem track:

“Hello my old friend. You’ve changed your name but not the ways you play pretend.”

Joining Substack was a big decision. I was genuinely scared about being sucked in. But, the work of these past years has paid off. Substack has been subsumed into my life rather than the other way round. I’ve set myself boundaries and goals: I don’t scroll the ‘home’ page (which is essentially X but seemingly nicer), I’m here to write rather than grow a following or self-promote (I was glad to read that Substack’s algorithm doesn’t prioritise frequency of posting) and I want to take up a space in a way that’s meaningful to me. That’s really all I can control.

Within this infinite digital galaxy there are, no doubt, moments of comfort and pleasure. But, we can continue to insist that our online lives, accessible and yet so remote, don’t seep into how we relate to each other in real life.

I hope to look up and catch your gaze on the tube, exchange a smile and remember the small kindness later when my head hits the pillow.