Why I'm Off Social Media (and also AI)

Do you remember boredom? Me neither. I, with the help of Zuckerberg and Co., have successfully eradicated boredom from my life over the past 10 years. 

It wasn’t a quick process. In the beginning, right around the time I got my first iPod Touch in 2013, my attention span was long and my feed was short. Social media (my fix of choice was Instagram in those days) was just something you checked once or twice a day, and then moved on. There wasn’t anything else to see back then, and feeds were organized strictly chronologically, and strictly based on the people one chose to follow. I still had to find my own ways to occupy the other 15 waking hours of the day.

Over time though, and dramatically bolstered by the advent of algorithms popularized by Tiktok and rapidly adapted throughout the social media-sphere, I had to worry less and less about a lack of new content to peruse. Sites like Quora (this was 2016) and Reddit helpfully provided a digest of new content, and I was only a refresh away from an entirely novel menu of things to read.

Then came the artificial intelligence. Like many of you, I was completely swept up in the craze, and vividly remember the first major email I “drafted” in early 2023–I was so excited to show my friends and family: “Look! I didn’t even write this email! I just told the website what I wanted the email to say!” Then I got (back) to college, and the temptation of using it for help on my assignments turned it from a helper to a crutch very quickly. Suffice it to say that ChatGPT played a key role in my first year at Columbia.

Recently, though, I’ve taken a step back, due in part to some insightful works that, in an ironic twist, I came across in my feeds: The first, an article titled “A warning to the young: just say no to AI,” gave voice to my inner fears–I genuinely believe that, as this article argues, using AI to think for me has made me a less intelligent person. Secondly, one of my favorite youtubers, Matt D’Avella, produced a video called “Why everyone is quitting social media” shining more light on the nefariousness of the almighty algorithm. About midway through the video, I had seen enough–I paused the video, deleted my Tiktok account, and resumed watching. 

Am I caught up in a frenzy, prompted by two chance media encounters to which I’m assigning outsized agency to make major life choices? “Maybe,” you might say if you’re my girlfriend or any other concerned stakeholder. To those people, I say: just give it a try. You don’t have to go scorched-earth and make any permanent, irreversible changes. Log out of your accounts. Cancel your ChatGPT Plus subscription, or block the site, or whatever you need to do for that one. You may just find that, like me, getting away from these services allows you to be more present and live a more connected and intentional life, finally back on your own terms.

I hope you find this content insightful. I’m experimenting with this format for the first time, so I’d love to hear your thoughts, whether good or bad. Thanks for your time in reading this, and I hope you come away encouraged to think more deeply about your relationship to the Internet.