For Lent, I decided to give up all social media but LinkedIn since I still desperately needed an internship in mid-February. Additionally, I would allow YouTube while eating meals.

I’ve wanted to get off social media for probably the last two years, dating back to when my friend and I discussed how nothing feels truly special or monumental anymore in pop culture. I forget what exactly sparked that — it might have been a celebrity death or something that we remarked would have in any other time period been a big deal. But it seems that things like Instagram, Snapchat, Tiktok, and Twitter/X inhibit us from having a system of forming an understanding and appreciation of our lives, the world around us, and the culture we live in. This is for three reasons, with the third being a really devilish one.

The first reason is the consumption of time. I’m not discovering fire when I say that social media wastes so much time — everyone knows it. Of course intentioned use can improve one’s life, be it a necessary medium of letting the brain relax after a day of hard work, or an access point to a vast amount of potential users for your cool business or community. However, the design of these things has the un-intentional user spending hours a day on these things. Performing some back of the envelope math, assuming the average global 21-year-old started using social media when they were 13, they have by now spent 288 combined days, of their entire single life, on social media.

The second is their structure. Specifically, scrolling-based social media like Instagram, X, and TikTok allow us an endless supply of things that we are sort-of interested in, guaranteed by us following the account of the poster. Not the coolest pictures and videos in the world, but it’s better than sitting and staring at the walls, so it’s really the perfect baseline activity. Baseline as in, we resort back to it when there’s nothing super pressing to do. The big issue with that though is that these things have been engineered by some of THE GREATEST MINDS ON THE PLANET and the greatest marketers too, resulting in the most addictive app for you, being sold as something that’s good for you.

The third and most devilish is the worst in my mind, although of course there may be arguments for the other two. That reason is this: the never-ending draw. Boredom is gone, and in its wake is constant access to content. I really don’t know what else to call it. While there is good content, it is mixed in with such a tremendous heap of nonsense that the special things we see are dulled to the point of just another 5 second (if it’s lucky) block in the hours-long collection of blocks we see throughout our day (and when we think in weeks of content-consumption, you now quickly realize why it is that we have no chance of acknowledging special things as special). Speaking from experience, I’ve caught myself so many times scrolling on Instagram and coming across something truly spectacular. Be it scenic Yellowstone or Kyoto, mind-shattering new AI capabilities, or my favorite comedian telling a joke — things that are objectively magnificent feats of humanity and the world (and in the third case just something at least worth watching) — and I find myself unable to focus for more than a few seconds.

The good thing about this is that after only a few days off, the attention span comes right back. However, social media’s addictiveness means without a drastic measure like Lent, most people will never make it more than a few days. There’s no pressing incentive to. You won’t get a heart attack if you use social media today. Your wife hasn’t said she’s leaving you and taking the kids in a week if you don’t stop looking at Trump Tweets. It really doesn’t seem that bad, so you always fall back into your old habits after a day or two. Additionally, as I previously stated, these things have been engineered to beat out will. It’s like the addictiveness of a cigarette. One won’t kill you, one-hundred (probably, I’m not a doctor) won’t kill you, but look back after 10 years of casual use, and regret is a foregone conclusion.

Now maybe if you kept a journal of every super cool thing you saw on social media, that would be a better way of using this technology so that the amazing content is not just sucked into the void along with the posts of LeBron’s triple-double from the night before. However, no one does that. I’ve tried many variations of it, but it hasn’t stuck, and I’m sure it’s because the algorithms are as addicting as possible. You see something amazing, you stay on to try and see if the next thing is even more amazing. Next thing you know you’re 4 Instagram posts past the Northern Lights’ spectacular imagery, and it’s gone from your memory. Scarily enough, in the grand scheme of things, this content consumption amounts to a whole heap of nothing. Best case scenario, you send it to a friend and have a funny conversation about it or get inspired, but that comes at the cost of dozens of minutes to hours of scrolling a day.

That dozens-of-minutes-to-hours:1-good-post ratio I realized while talking to another friend is really what resulted in my biggest internal driver to find out what would happen if I got away from the whole thing altogether. Cal Newport, a Georgetown University computer science professor, writer, and most notably one of the only Zuckerberg contemporaries to not get into social media, ran a study for a New Yorker article he wrote some years back, where he devised a plan to pretty much see what would happen if volunteers deleted social media for 30 days with the hopes of seeking out a better understanding of what they like to do with their time, how that can push them towards making and working towards more valuable goals, and ultimately re-assessing their use of social media.

By chance, I stumbled upon and listened to a podcast episode of his right before Lent while thinking of what to give up, when he talked about this study and his findings. Notably, he found that just about everyone after the 30 days decided to re-implement social media very differently than they had used it before (now whether or not they reverted to full-blown, guardrails-off use in the future is unknown). I’m not going to go back and look for examples, but the general gist of outcomes is that someone decided to only use X to write posts that their friends would see, or someone would only use Facebook to market their business, or only use Instagram on Fridays for an hour with a glass of wine. Essentially, and I’m sure it’s easy to imagine, people realized that deliberate time away from social media that was instead used for more intentional means led to the answers they knew were always there.

Now for my self-administration of this challenge: it was awesome. It’s now three days past Easter, so while I’m sure more insights will come, I have enough from reflection to write about my takeaways. To re-iterate since the first iteration was also the first sentence of this whole post, my Lent called for no social media but LinkedIn for internship search purposes, and YouTube for eating purposes.