I’ve Been Off Social Media For Six Months. Here’s How It Feels.

Notes from an extremely offline life

The last few months of 2023 were a bittersweet time for me.  There were positive things happening, certainly.  It was college football season, an immediate mood booster.  The weather was turning crisp and it was getting dark earlier.  I know that sounds counterintuitive, but I think I have some kind of reverse Seasonal Affective Disorder where I tend to get really happy in the winter and sad in the summer.  I’d rather be cold and cozy than hot and sweaty any day of the week.  Thanksgiving and Christmas were right around the corner, and with that comes every excuse to eat and drink whatever you want with the promise of “turning it around” come January.  All good stuff.

But hanging over the whole thing was the fact that I knew my comedy career, the animating force of my life over the previous decade and a half, was coming to a close.  My last show was going to be on December 17th, 2023, fifteen years to the day from the first time I got on stage.  I had had enough, and it was time to put the mic down.  And while that bummed me out, there was something on the other side of it that I knew would help soften the blow.  Once I quit comedy, I was going to delete my social media presence and become an online ghost.  Without comedy, I no longer needed or wanted these accounts, and it was the perfect opportunity to free myself from them.

I first signed up for Facebook in the spring of 2005 when it became available at my college. My online footprint only grew from there.  Twitter in early 2009, Instagram in 2014, TikTok somewhere in the endless haze of the COVID lockdowns.  I signed up for Snapchat at one point but never really took to it.  I probably still have a dormant account floating out there somewhere. 

But if I’m being honest, my first interactions with the mechanics of social media, of curating and broadcasting a personality to peers in an online space while simultaneously consuming their equally curated personalities, came in middle school when I signed up for AOL Instant Messenger.

That really was the starting point of this technology, wasn’t it?  AIM was gunpowder to TikTok’s hydrogen bomb.  You didn’t have to talk to friends or members of the opposite sex face to face, you could take your time and craft your response to showcase your best possible self.  In fact, when it came to chatting with girls, it was preferred that you didn’t respond right away, lest you look desperate.  The same didn’t hold true in real life.  If a girl asked you a question at school and you just stared at her for five minutes before giving your answer, you’d look like a huge creep.  But waiting to respond was a best practice on AIM.

However, chatting was small potatoes compared to AIM’s most important feature, the away message.  This was where you could really showcase who you were, or more precisely, how you wanted to be seen.  They were the original status updates, the first tweets, the proto-captions.  You could leave pithy remarks, song lyrics (Dashboard Confessional and Death Cab For Cutie were fashionable in the Y2K era), or you could copy and paste funny lines from conversations with other friends that showcased how smart, clever or outrageous you both were.  Modern day social media is just this stuff with higher quality images.

Millennials were especially primed for Facebook and other social media platforms specifically because of our experience with AIM, and we ran with it once the opportunity arose.  In 2024, we’ve now had a public-facing Online Self for over half of our lives.  That’s a long time to be performing for a faceless crowd.  When I knew my time online was about to be up, I wondered what it would feel like to shut all of that down and have my only consequential actions take place in the real world.  Would it feel radically different?  Or had the Internet already fried my brain past the point of no return?

The first thing I noticed was the absolute thrill I got from physically deleting my social media accounts.  Not just the apps, but actually going into my profile and deactivating the entire thing.  This might be the lamest, saddest thing I’ll ever write on here, but it feels incredibly empowering to fight through all the blockers and “Are You Sure?''s that Mark Zuckerberg puts in place to stop you from removing yourself from his money printing online ecosystem.  When the final prompt arose, I pressed DEACTIVATE with all the force my thumb could muster.  Deleting my Twitter account was equally electrifying.  It felt like finally breaking things off with an abusive ex who did nothing but emotionally terrorize you and call you a racist.  

So I finished deleting everything, and I felt great for an afternoon.  But once that excitement wore off, I was then stuck in my new offline reality. That’s where the true change began to set in.

The most immediate difference I noticed was that I suddenly had no reason to casually pick up my phone.  Sure, I might grab it to Google something or look something up on Wikipedia, but there was no outlet for that kind of thoughtless scrolling we so easily fall into whenever we’re bored and need a distraction.  I remember going to get a smoothie about a week after I deactivated, waiting for around five minutes, and just staring at the wall the entire time.  I had no feeds to check to keep myself occupied, so all I could do was look off into the middle distance until my order was called.  It felt weird as hell and kind of uncomfortable, but I was very happy about it.

I also began to notice everyone around me, glued to their phones, eyes inches away from their LED screens.  I felt completely repulsed.  The physical act of scrolling began to look grotesque once I was no longer engaged in it.  It’s like I was finally able to step outside The Matrix and get a look at everyone in their little pods, still completely plugged in.  This also gave me a great opportunity to feel like I was better than everyone around me.  “Look at me,” I thought, “being present in the moment while these plebes watch idiotic TikToks.  I’m such an enlightened individual.”  Any time I felt this impulse creeping up in me, I had to remind myself that I’d be doing the exact same thing if I still had my accounts.  No one is immune to the siren song of the apps.

Beyond the changes to my physical actions in the real world, there were also changes to my state of mind.  I thought these would come about almost immediately, but it happened more slowly than I anticipated.  It was less like turning off a light switch and more like going through a slow motion detox.  Like any hard drug, dopamine addiction is immediate, but recovery takes longer.

I thought I’d immediately begin having clearer, more engaging thoughts, but my brain mostly felt like it was broadcasting dead air.  I think this is because I was no longer taking in so many points of view every day, hearing what random people thought about what was going on in their lives and the world around them.  I once heard someone say that social media colonizes your brain, meaning it implants thoughts that you never would have had or cared about in the first place.  I tense up now even writing the word “colonize” because of how loaded it’s become over the last year, and that’s fully the result of taking in so many aggressive discussions about it online.

So it makes sense that my mind would go blank once I got off social media.  It was so conditioned to receiving inputs that it defaulted to a sort of stand-by mode, waiting to be told the next thing it should think about.  Only after a month or so did normal, unprompted thoughts start returning to me, which was right around the time I began working on this Substack.  Writing turned over the soil in my own brain, allowing original ideas to rise to the surface and grow.

This was one of my main hopes of logging off.  I wanted to disconnect from the capital D “Discourse” that’s always swirling around us.  And while I’ve done that, it’s not as big of a relief as I thought it would be. And that’s for one simple reason: I don’t know what I’m missing.  When I was fully immersed in it, I would think “Wow I can’t wait until I no longer have to hear about Topic X or Topic Y.  It’s going to be so freeing.”  But without being plugged into the online world, I no longer even know what Topic X or Topic Y are.  I have no idea what inane subjects are being discussed online, so I’m completely unaware of what it is I should be grateful to no longer hear about.  It’s a weird sort of pretzel logic, but that’s the best way I can describe it.

I’ll be honest though, there is a certain kind of tension and fear that comes with missing out on this stuff.  None of it is super relevant in the grand scheme of things (my life was not made worse by being unaware of the Kate Middleton BBL conspiracy theories) but it is a little unsettling to know that a bunch of people are discussing a topic that you have no knowledge of.  It feels like you’re slowly detaching yourself from society.  

And, truthfully, I do kind of miss the stimulation of taking in all of this nonsense, just on a purely neurological level.  There’s certainly a perverse thrill that comes during moments when you fully immerse yourself in the online world.  There’s a great scene in Bo Burnham’s movie Eighth Grade that showcases this experience, set to that “Sail Away” song by Enya.  But when I start feeling this way, missing the rush of the digital realm, I stop and ask myself, “How badly do I really need to see these Taylor Swift memes?”

In spite of the few misgivings I’ve had, I know that the decision to log off was the right one.  Because by leaving behind the dopamine rollercoaster that is being online, I also left behind something deeply nefarious and damaging, something that predates smartphones and social media but has been turbocharged by them in the modern era.  I left behind the desire to curate, broadcast, and monitor my own self image.

People have been playing into personas that are not aligned with who they are for thousands of years.  It’s part of our natural behavior.  But never before in human history have we had the ability to do this at scale, at all hours of the day, even when we’re alone in a room.  I mean, is there anything more depraved and damaging than re-watching your own Instagram Stories?  You’re putting an image out there and taking it in at the same time.  You are acting as both performer and audience, and this idea of yourself that you’ve cultivated is the subject.  You’re no longer simply the Split Self that I mentioned in last week’s post, you’ve now fragmented yourself into multiple pieces, all distinct in their function and completely disunified.  No wonder this stuff drives people crazy.  By breaking apart into so many disparate elements, we’re creating even more open space for pathologies and vices to seep in and fill the void.

Anna Khachiyan, co-host of the Red Scare podcast, recently caught heat online for saying that all selfies are inherently pornographic.  People claimed she was thinking like a Luddite, or worse, a Boomer.  But I think she’s on to something.  Much like porn stars, we’re taking something inherently meaningful, commodifying it, and giving it away.  None of us should be monitoring or interacting with our own image this much.  The sense of a unified Self is too important to just turn over to the unwashed hordes of the Internet.  You’re putting your sense of personal power, agency, and identity in the hands of an unthinking algorithm and an unfeeling public.  There are better things you can do with your time.  I’ll resist the temptation to condescendingly advise people to “Go outside and touch grass,” but I’m sure that’s where you’ll most likely end up.

So where does that leave me now?  Now that I’m six months out, what do I think the next six months (and beyond) will look like for me?  First, I need to admit to myself that I’m not completely offline.  I do have this Substack, where I post weekly.  There is a slight difference in that my full name and image are not attached to it, so it mostly sidesteps the Split Self issue.  But that doesn’t mean it isn’t without pitfalls.  A semi-anonymous Substack isn’t the same thing as a personal Instagram account, but it’s in the same ballpark.

Because I have this Substack (a result of an innate desire to clarify and communicate my worldview) I do feel the temptation to re-engage with the online world.  If my posts are really supposed to be about “comedy, art, and culture,” I almost need to know what everyone else is talking about so I can properly comment on it.  I have to wade in the dirty waters of culture so I can understand it.  There’s also a certain base curiosity I have about the online world in general.  I want to know what’s going on, simply because I want to know.  

The workaround I’ve come up with, one I’m not totally sure I’m going to implement yet, is to create Instagram, Twitter and TikTok accounts for this Substack.  That way I can promote my work here, see what’s going on in the world, and resist the temptation to make these accounts a projection of “Me,” the guy who sits at a keyboard and types all of this stuff.  I might do it, I might not.  It would feel nice to be a little more engaged, but I’m worried about getting completely sucked back into The Matrix.  My only hope is that these six months away have given me the distance and perspective required to maintain something resembling a healthy balance between the offline and online worlds. I haven’t decided what I’m going to do yet.  We’ll see how it shakes out.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go out, get a coffee, do nothing but stare at the wall while I wait for them to finish making my order, and silently judge everyone around me for looking at their phones. Who knows how much longer I’ll be able to do this before I become like them once again.