Recently, a 19-year-old social media star dropped a bomb on her followers – that she would be abandoning all social media. That included saying goodbye to her tens of thousands of followers and subscribers on Instagram and YouTube, as well as deleting her Tumblr and forgetting her Facebook. Why would someone whose living was based on the money she made from her social media success willingly give up her source of income? Well, that answer can be simply that she wanted to set an example for her 12-year-old self, and all of the other adolescents who look up to the people who have a large following and live seemingly perfect lives.
Essena O’neill didn’t want to be the reason a teenager had low self esteem or saw themselves as boring or less than her because of the way they looked or because of the opportunities they were presented with. She decided to break that cycle and be a “Game Changer” – making sure to create a website to make her new project better-known and organized. She claimed that social media wasn’t “real”, and that it was forcing her to live in a 2D world, she “wasn’t living in a 3D world.”
This got me to thinking. Am I living in a two-dimensional world too, when I could be doing other more important, tangible, three dimensional things? Part of her now-deleted video explaining her choice to quit social media offered a challenge to the viewers – to delete their social media and see how the lack of such a thing affected their lives. At first I was skeptical, hesitant and even a little afraid to delete the apps that I admittedly spent hours and hours of my free time on. But, I realized how ridiculous it was of me to be afraid to give up something that really should not play such a tremendous role in my life, so, I took it upon myself to delete the apps from my phone at 8:30 PM on a Tuesday night, and made a promise to myself to keep them off of my device for a full week.
According to my iPhone’s battery statistics, in the week previous to my decision to ditch my social media, I had spent 11.6 hours on those apps. If you choose to round it up, half of a day of my week was spent mindlessly scrolling through Twitter, or needlessly watching YouTube videos or ridiculously wasting time on Facebook, when I could have been doing things that mattered. After this realization, I was excited to see how I would spend that extra half-day I had in the week to come.
Miraculously, that night was the first time I actually studied for a Calculus test. The next day was the first time I aced a Calculus test. Magic? Coincidence? The leaf? Probably not. I assume my success was due to the fact that I didn’t have an excuse to not study. Usually, I will plan to study, get home, stay on Twitter for hours, and then realize that I just have “no time” to study. I’m “too tired”, I have “better things to do”, et cetera. So, the first thing I learned from this experience was that I was a big fat liar. I tell myself that I don’t have time to study or do homework, but really, I’m making dumb excuses to waste valuable time on worthless things.
Not only did I manage to study for an important test, I was able to get homework done, at home. The irony that some students, if not many, fail to complete homework at home seems to be quite ridiculous, and probably rooted in the fact that students believe they don’t have time to do it, but really they spend too much time on social media when they should be doing their work at home, at night, and not at school during lunch.
The remainder of the 11.6 hours I spent with family and friends, or reading books, organizing my room, doing chores or other productive things that meant much more to me than what other people were tweeting about doing. By the middle of the week, I was wondering why I hadn’t started this challenge earlier. It had done nothing but great things for me, sure, a few times I was lost when people talked about some joke that had passed around while I was on vacation from the social media world, but that really didn’t matter to me when I considered the positive aspects of this vacation.
Another pro to doing this challenge was the extra sleep I was able to get. Instead of needlessly lying awake while staring at a tiny glowing screen until midnight, I turned off the lights and went straight to sleep. Distraction-free to me meant that I had no reason to not go to sleep. This extra sleep turned me into a happier person in the morning – ready to face the day and learn things at school (another plus to having no distractions – you have no reason not to listen to your teachers).
So, by the time the week was over, I had learned that social media was not as important as I had originally thought. It was not necessary to my every-day life, if anything, it was really excessive. Without it, I could get much more done and get much more sleep, which makes a bigger difference than you might think. Everyone who spends their free time on social media should take a week off and see how it affects their life, I promise, there will be more positives than negatives, and after they ace their [insert difficult class here] test and get a few more hours of sleep, they will thank themselves, and possibly me.
