I hope you leave the places that suffocate you.

I was an early and widespread adopter to the social world of the internet. I had Myspace, Yahoo360, Blogger, Facebook, Youtube, Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Lapse, Bereal and more. If I knew even just one person on it, I tried it.

I made some pretty cool friends. I learned hobbies and studied cultures. I found new restaurants and tried new recipes. Consumed more content than I would dare put a number on. I went through many phases and life-stages online. From 13-32, social media saw me become a dozen variations of myself.

As I became an adult the past I had built on social media at times felt confining, heavy, or exhausting. So much information. So many connections. People I used to know, things I used to like. Algorithms pushing me deeper into certain thought patterns and interests. Extremizing me. Maximizing my time attention and affections in ways I couldn’t and didn’t always want to keep up with. From time to time I would get off socials, archive accounts, delete apps… step back through the proverbial wardrobe, lock the door, and shut myself out of the magical internet world. But eventually the siren song promising an untamed, unexplored world of creativity and inclusion lured me back to unlock the wardrobe and step inside.

When I was in tenth grade we read Lord of the Flies in school. I remember clearly the feelings of disgust and shock that I felt reading about the behavior of the wild boys at the end of the book. The idea that civilized people could become such animals when left to their own devices was startling, as it was intended to be. The feelings I felt reading Lord of the Flies are not that different from the way I feel about social media today. I look away, back into the kinder, gentler world, but I pick the book up again and again because as shocking as the mess is, it’s a tragedy you can’t tear your eyes from.

I think this is the end of the book for me. I think I can comfortably say that this time, I’m not locking the wardrobe. I’m burning it down. I have come to the clear realization that all the things social media promises (exploration, creativity, connection) it cannot deliver. You can only explore as far as your algorithm allows, promoting the content it thinks that will make you buy, click, and subscribe. You can only create as far as gets likes, views, and saves - otherwise your creativity is buried in the landslide of mass created content that can be soulless as long as it’s profitable. You can connect…to the stores, influencers, and news channels. And maybe sometimes, if you’re lucky, to your own, actual friends.

I recently read a book about restricted social media use for children and young teens. The book acts as a pair of binoculars to help you crisp up the sight of what you always suspected but didn’t know for sure. I picked up the book because I am a mother trying not to raise a “sticky ipad kid”. I put the book down, happy I read it for a completely different reason.

Reading the opt-out family was like reaching the end of The Lord of the Flies and finding out that the boat had been sunk intentionally. That the whole thing had been manipulated, planned, to drive the boys to more and more insane actions for the benefit of some unseen entity. It was realizing that the horror of the story wasn’t that this was in the boys all along, but that it had been planted there and fostered until it was all that remained of them.

Erin Loechner outlines the ways social media is designed to instigate our most negative emotions, trigger our addictive behaviors, and put salt in the wounds of our insecurities all to motivate us to hand over our commitment, attention, and money.

No surprises there right? We all knew that social media promoted whatever was the most effective to grow it’s platform and it’s money making power. But what’s a little attention in exchange for a little entertainment? That’s all we’re talking about here isn’t it?

I could go to great lengths to list out the facts, statistics, and quotes that Erin shares in The Opt Out Family. But I don’t think I need to. If you really want to know them, you can read the book. But you kind of already know what they say, don’t you?

And that’s the point of this whole piece. That was the straw the broke the camels back. The match to the door of the wardrobe. The raft off the island. It’s that I already knew. Maybe not exactly. But I knew that if I was on a date with social media he would describe himself as manipulative, selfish, and at times downright abusive. Then he would gaslight me for trying to leave. He’s a walking red flag. And I’ve been with him all these years trying to tell my girlfriends that he’s actually not that bad. Sure he has problems but doesn’t everyone? He has some really great qualities too.

Except those qualities are the very things he uses to keep me paying his bills and taking his crap.

So one by one I’ve been downloading my data, collecting addresses and phone numbers, and deleting accounts I have had for a decade or more. I’m watching the island disappear in the distance. I am watching the ashes of the wardrobe float away on the wind. I’m deleting his number from my phone. And in the wake of it’s absence I’m realizing how much I hated it there.

I hope you have the confidence to leave the places that suffocate you. You don’t have to stay.