This is my third time writing this article. When I first sat down in front of my laptop at the end of my weeklong social media hiatus, I was stumped. I had been anticipating this moment all week – this was when I was supposed to return from my completely stress-free and productive week of self-reflection and write a beautiful memoir educating my peers on all the ways social media has ruined their lives.
However, that wasn’t the case. Not only had my brilliant experiment yielded far from optimal results, but my first rough draft resembled something more of a poorly written lab report than the poetic masterpiece I was manifesting.
The truth is, I was expecting my brief disappearance from the online world to solve all my problems in some shape or form.
When that didn’t happen, I deemed the whole thing a failure.
In hindsight, this reaction is what made my experience more powerful. If everything had gone perfectly to plan, I would have my own version of every other social media essay on the internet; one that very few high schoolers would willingly read.
I initially came up with this idea after reading an MOR article from 2020 by Emily Hamilton titled “slumped,” and I began to realize just how much social media was interfering with my everyday life. Hamilton’s article talks about how ORHS students aren’t getting enough sleep and points out that most students’ lack of sleep has less to do with the amount of homework they have and more to do with the amount of time they spend procrastinating said homework, usually on their phone.
Like many teenagers, social media accounts for a large percentage of the time I spend on devices. I wanted to see how much more productive and present I could be without the constant distraction of apps like Instagram and TikTok.
Thus began my challenge. For one week, I deleted all forms of social media from my phone, to see how truly productive and ‘in the moment’ I could be.
Day one: The first thing I realized when I woke up on Monday morning was how strong my instinct was to open my phone. Usually, I would spend the next few minutes scrolling Instagram or Pinterest, catching up on everything I’d missed over the few hours I was asleep. But, with those apps deleted from my phone, I was forced to turn off my alarm and start getting ready for school. This ultimately led to me feeling less rushed, having an extra 10 minutes that would be otherwise spent on social media – an encouraging revelation to kick off the day.
Day two: I had a conversation with one of my friends about what technically counted as social media. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, social media is defined as websites and applications which enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking. By these standards, I wasn’t using social media, but that didn’t mean I was completely detached from the internet.
I still spent a significant amount of time staring at a screen, either from working on my computer or finding other ways to distract myself on my phone like reorganizing my entire camera roll. I also still found myself saving my homework until late at night, despite the absence of social media which has been a major distraction in the past.
Day three: By this point I seemed to be getting the hang of living life unplugged. So much so that I forgot to grab my phone at the end of the school day and ended up leaving it overnight in Mr. Kelly’s classroom, ironically, the teacher for whose class I’m writing this for.
While leaving my phone in my classrooms is becoming an increasingly regular occurrence, especially with the recent implementation of the ‘phone zone,’ locking it inside the school for the entire night was a first.
Part of me was upset of course, but I was also interested to see how the rest of the day would go for the sake of my journalism project. While the evening itself was anticlimactic in terms of interesting details to add to this story, I was pleased to find that my primary worry was not missing out on all my friends’ posts like it might have been on a different week. Instead, it was the fact that my rather embarrassingly titled alarm was scheduled to go off at seven in the morning when I wouldn’t be around to turn it off.
Days four/five: By the fourth and fifth days, I remember feeling frustrated. Staying off social media wasn’t the problem for me, it was the fact that it wasn’t magically making me more productive and happier, at least not in the way I had hoped it would. Despite spending about two less hours than usual pumping meaningless content into my brain, there wasn’t a dramatic shift in the amount of work I was able to get done or in my quality of sleep. Perhaps even more discouraging was the fact that I still found plenty of ways to compare myself to others.
Day six: It’s shocking to think about how much of my life revolves around catering to other people’s perceptions of me. While I’d consider myself to be a pretty self-aware person, it still comes as a surprise just how easy it is to get caught in the ‘comparison trap’. My first instinct is to blame this on the strategically edited highlight posts that pop up on my phone every day, but I found that even without that, my thoughts were consistently focused on how I compared to others, even just walking around the cross-country venue at which my race was being held.
“I wish I had her hair.”
“I wish I had their confidence.”
“I wish I could run as fast as some of my teammates.”
In my experience, social media isn’t the direct cause of our insecurities but rather perpetuates ones we already have. I can always find a way to put myself down, social media simply hands it to me on a silver platter.
Day seven: As my thumb hovered over the ‘reinstall’ button, I noticed that I wasn’t excited to go back to having my entire social life at my fingertips once again. Not only did my experiment ‘fail’ but I was about to slip right back into my old fake dopamine seeking habits.
To say I hadn’t missed the infinite stream of content to distract me from all my problems wouldn’t be the truth, but that’s exactly what it was to me. A distraction. Not necessarily from my schoolwork, although I have procrastinated my fair share of assignments, but from my own personal worries that were much easier to forget about with every scroll, every new personally targeted post, than confront.
People love to paint social media as the ultimate evil – including myself. For every eye roll I’ve given my parents for telling me to get off my phone, I’ve made just as many negative comments about my own screen time. As someone who generally tries to distance myself from the inherent dangers of social media as much as possible (pretty unsuccessfully might I add), I am fully aware of how bad these apps can make me feel about myself.
It wasn’t until I sat down to write this section that I realized just how much time I spend trying to get people to like me both in person, and online. I can sit here and talk about how annoyed I get when my friends spend hours making perfectly curated posts of their life highlights only to second guess everything down to the color of the heart emoji in the caption, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t do the same thing.
Recently, I had a lengthy conversation with Abby Owens, former MOR editor in chief over the phone and she spoke about her own unique experiences with social media. Owens realized that her obsession with self-improvement, a result of her increase in social media use during the pandemic, was becoming unhealthy and decided to take a break. Her absence from social media ended up lasting several years and it wasn’t until the beginning of her senior year of high school that she returned with aspirations of finding a college roommate. Owens expressed her frustration in feeling like every moment of her life was lived for the sake of her online profile since her reappearance.
She told me how, in her opinion, this change made it nearly impossible for her to fully live in the moment. Owens shared that she occasionally felt as if some of the things she did with her friends were done solely for the sake of posting about it.
“Let’s do this thing because we love each other but also so we can take pictures, and so other people can see how much we love each other,” said Owens as she described the internal thought process of her friend group.
As Owens put it, getting social media can feel like signing a deal with the devil.
What she found most intriguing was that despite already knowing its negative effects, we still willingly allow ourselves to get engrossed in these apps for the sake of connection and entertainment.
Obviously, breaking free of this for one singular week isn’t going to fix every problem in my life. However, what it did do is give me time to get things done without the looming distraction of ‘one more video’ and to reflect on why I constantly find myself trapped in an obsessive pattern of self-comparison – something that is only enhanced by social media.
At the end of the day (or in this case, week), it’s all about finding a healthy balance.
A few weeks ago, I spoke with Erinn Doherty (25’) about the different methods she’s used to reduce her daily social media consumption. As someone who is passionate about maintaining a healthy relationship with social media, she’s taken matters into her own hands. “I set my own screen time limits for apps that I spend the most amount of time on… I bypass it a lot, but it makes me more aware of how much time I’m spending.”
Doherty recognizes the many positives to social media, in addition to its downsides. That said, it’s important to her that she also has time to focus on her hobbies like painting in addition to her schoolwork instead of scrolling through meaningless content for hours at a time. “If nothing else, [social media] takes up so much time,” said Doherty.
Owens agrees; however, she highlights that it’s important to understand why you’re procrastinating in the first place, either simply from boredom, or a bigger underlying issue. “Wasted time is wasted time, it doesn’t have to be spent on social media.”
Our generation lives with a double-edged sword in our pocket.
We live in a time in which these platforms are inevitably going to have an impact on our high school experience. While, to my ultimate disappointment, my time spent away from social media did not give me a perfectly clear vision on how to properly wield it, it certainly gave me clarity into my own life and helped me begin to develop a healthier relationship with the apps I spend hours scrolling through, one that we all need.
-Jahrie Houle
Mouth of the River 
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