You want to quit social media but you don’t want to quit the game

The good, the bad and the ugly about online life

It’s January 2025 on Substack, which means our feeds are flooded with posts about stepping away from social media and consciously choosing to spend more time offline. If Substack had hashtags, the term ‘brainrot’ would be highly trending.

The proliferation of writers opening up about the perils of social media has been hard to miss in recent weeks, from Gina Martin discussing her year of offline weekends including the benefits to her mental health and productivity, Molly Ella’s beautiful words on the person she’s become after quitting social media for good and Francesca Hadland’s honest and relatable piece on waving goodbye to the algorithm. We’re finally coming out of the closet with our hands up in surrender saying that we’re done with Instagram, TikTok, X and any distant relatives.

What’s remarkable is just how much we’re identifying with each other in the way of the doom-scrolling, complaints about feeling overstimulated, hours wasted in front of our phones that could be spent more meaningfully and the inescapable trap of comparison that comes with being exposed to so much information about so many people.

Yet how many of us are reading these narratives, relating deeply, liking and joining in in the comments only to switch apps to scroll the same feed you’ve just shamed for ruining your life. There are two reasons: firstly, social media is literally designed for us to be addicted to it and, secondly, a part of you actually enjoys it.

What if the role of social media wasn’t as black and white as we make it out to be, but instead a spectrum of shades that can compliment our lives and interests?

As a millennial who has had stints on MySpace, Tumblr and Facebook, I have lived through the evolution of social media. It is no longer just a space for being social but where we consume our news, where culture and trends are literally created and where we can can buy anything from clothes to toilet roll at the click of a button.

One of the reasons why I refuse to step away from social media completely is because where else would I get my daily dose of cocker spaniel videos to remind me of my beloved family dog, an endless source of recipe inspiration when I find myself cooking the same thing or my holy grail for post-Met Gala memes on an otherwise monotonous Tuesday morning. My friends and I have put together comprehensive holiday itineraries simply from sharing travel videos with one another online and, the coolest thing, I’ve made connections with people around the world who I wouldn’t otherwise meet in my day-to-day life. Instagram is where I first told people about my Substack, where I got my first followers from, as well as the feedback to keep writing. Without social media, I may never have had the platform to get my writing published and read by hundreds of you.

I completely recognise that we shouldn’t be using social media to replace real-life experiences and also perhaps to stalk our exes, but we can’t deny that it’s all bad.

Then there’s the game of it all: the likes, followers, views and comments. What a strange world to live in, where so much of our validation comes from such esoteric metrics. We’re taught to strive for an ideal followers-to-following ratio, or that hitting a certain amount of followers is deemed a milestone, even as so-called ‘normal’ people whose careers don’t depend on these outputs.

What if, instead of running away from the doom of social media, you could make social media work for you? I used to be that person constantly stuck in the cycle of deleting then re-installing the apps depending on whether or not I felt anxious or bored in the moment. Now, they just sit on my phone taking up space but not taking over my whole life. And I promise that there’s a world in which you can have this too.

Forget about curating your social media. You need to start with re-building your feed brick by brick. It goes without saying that any acquaintance, influencer or business who triggers feelings of jealousy, irritability or even boredom in you should be unfollowed, or at the very least muted, with immediate effect. Ignorance is bliss and sometimes a bit of forced ignorance is what is needed to preserve your sanity. When you only have true friends, people you admire and people who inspire you filling your feed, social media can actually become an uplifting space in which to spend your time.

Then comes the topic of posting: do we or don’t we and, if the former, what should we share with others. About a year ago, with the exception of my writing and that of my friends, I stopped posting stories altogether on all platforms. I was tired of stopping my life not just to take a photo or video, but then having to open an app, choose a suitable tag or caption, press post and monitor all the interactions, with the goal of achieving what? Showing people that I was busy, doing interesting things in interesting places with the net effect of stopping myself from living in the moment.

Online and offline, you don’t have to share anything that you don’t feel fully comfortable in sharing and you most definitely don’t have to do this in real-time. I will still occasionally post the odd photo of myself or share pictures from an earlier holiday because there’s a feminine side of me who loves to dress up and take nice photos. And why not? I’m a doctor who otherwise lives in hospital scrubs. When I do so, however, it’s not for anyone else apart from me and I couldn’t give you any information on the engagement because I simply don’t care.

Whether we like it or not, social media is part of the modern fabric of society and, unless you’re a TikTok-binging American, it’s here to stay. It’s easy to romanticise life without social media; a quieter, simpler existence where our worth isn’t tethered to likes, views or, god forbid, an aesthetic. With a bit of conscious effort, however, I do believe that there’s a happy medium to be found and the key here is intention.

You can decide what purpose social media serves for you, not the other way around.

Perhaps the real challenge is not in stepping away from social media altogether, but in untangling the good from the bad, reclaiming our agency and deciding which parts of the game are worth playing.