Hi, welcome to my new feature where I will be testing out different lifestyles over a five day period, while spending the other two days reflecting on the positive and negative effects. This week I will be testing out a lifestyle without social media. Social media–whether you love it, hate it, or love to hate it–has managed to consume our life one way or another. This revolutionary form of communication has allowed Generation Z to exchange ideas in a quick and humorous format, but it comes to a point where it begins to affect our legitimate social exchanges. A study has even shown that forty percent of the experimented pool confessed that they spend more time interacting with people online than they do face-to-face. Freshman Ben Burris points out that “Social media can be distracting because the youth are always on their phones.” This is why I decided to put myself up to the challenge and go five days without social media. What I thought would be the most tedious week of my teenaged life, turned into an exhilarating and stimulating experience that has positively changed my life with certainty.
I started my Monday morning by deleting my Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, Vine, Facebook, and Tumblr apps. The first day of my ‘social media detox,’ I noticed that multiple times in the day, I would unconsciously scroll through my phone to find my deleted apps in times that using social media was completely unnecessary. I realized that I was on social media originally when I could have been easily talking to people. Sophomore Lily Alomari agrees with me by expressing, “Social media allows people to hide behind screens and limit social interactions with people face-to-face.” While walking to my classes or riding in cars, I noticed that I was taking in my environment and talking to my friends and family rather than looking agape at my phone.
Homework is a task that can take one hour or eight hours, depending on how time is managed. Social media is an entertaining and mindless activity, but it can become very easy to procrastinate for hours on end. Junior Torrey Salas explains, “If I am working on something, I try my hardest to ignore different social media apps because it makes it much easier for me to stay focused and finish what I need to do.” I noticed that my sleep schedule and my time-management skills improved drastically after taking out the social media aspect of my day, and I had more time to do things that I actually enjoyed.
So where am I now, after five days lacking direct messages, retweets, and geotags? I have downloaded Twitter and Snapchat back onto my phone, but I do not check them more than twice a day now. I decided to turn my notifications off, and I took Twitter off of my dock to minimize easy access. I realized that I never loved these social media apps; I just used them so frequently that it developed into a mild obsession. I am no longer configuring my experiences into 140 characters or less or editing every picture I take to see if it is ‘Instagram worthy’. I will never not marvel at the powerful influence social media has had on our society, but taking this five-day challenge, I have gained much needed perspective and self-control that has overall impacted me for the better. This is a five-day-long lifestyle that I would definitely recommend!