I’m quitting social media – at least the three top ones – Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. I’m thinking of it as a way to reduce the distractions in my life, to take me closer to living a more minimalist lifestyle. It’s not going to be easy, being a social media addict since social media was born, but I am willing to give it a try.

Endless scrolling

I’ve grown tired of mindlessly refreshing and scrolling on these apps. I do it at the office when I should be focusing on work. I do it over lunch when I should be bonding with friends. And especially at night, during bed time, when I should be sleeping. It’s the feeling of wanting something new, something interesting that could feed that urge in my brain that gets me restless. And when I find nothing interesting, I still continue refreshing until something good pops up. That’s a lot of time wasted on nothing. A lot of time I could have spent doing something else I really want to do.

Productive time

My main goal in doing this is to maximize the time I get in a day doing the things I want to do. That includes blogging, studying Japanese, catching up on anime and my favorite series, and reading piled up books. Some of these are little things, but the first two items are goals I’ve been putting off since forever.

• Blogging – instead of uploading a photo on Instagram or posting a tweet about a topic I feel strongly about, I would rather make a blog post about it. I’ve said it before that social media killed blogging. Everything is instant, and the feedback you get is also instant. But I feel like I’ve lost something important along the way – taking time to relish in the moment, and reliving it later through a lengthy blogpost. And because there’s more effort involved in it, it becomes more special to me. I can also easily trace a blog post vs. a tweet or an FB/IG post (talk about more scrolling). I started with blogging and I want to continue doing that moving forward.
• Studying Japanese – there has been countless nights when I plan to study, and then I realize I’ve wasted four hours on my phone. It’s a significant number of hours wasted. My goal was to take JLPT N3 by December, and that has been my goal since last year – it just got postponed twice because I could never find the time to study. I’m cutting it tight this year, but I will have to make do with the time I have left because I don’t want to push it back any longer. If I fail, at least I gave it my all, and it will be easier to take it again next year.

Minimalism

The past few weeks, I have been fighting the urge to buy a new phone (ehem, One Plus 6). This is mainly because my current phone hangs up a lot when I use Instagram and Facebook. Quitting social media eliminates that “need” because really, I will just be using my phone for basic things like messaging and calling.  This will probably cut down my phone time by more than 50%. So yes, I am proud of myself for doing this because I will save myself from spending money I don’t have.

Quitting social media also means not being able to see only the good things people post about. I admit, it gets depressing to see your friends having the time of their lives, while you’re stuck at home on your phone on a Friday night. There are studies done correlating the rise of depression to the rise of social media and this is true. Even if we don’t acknowledge it, deep inside we will want to show others that we’re doing fine on social media, even if we’re not. I get depressed about not having any new photo to post on Instagram. It’s sad, but it’s real. At least I don’t have to worry about that anymore.

TL;DR

I sound like I am convincing myself that I’m doing the right thing. That’s partly true. This is a big change for me and to be honest, I’m not sure how long I can keep up. But, similar to me jumping on the Keto diet on a whim, I hope this will bring me more good along the way.  It may just be as small as completing my list of anime to watch, or as big as making extra money on the side (I don’t know how but it could happen). Let’s see what happens! Quitting social media will be good for me. That I know.