You know social media is bad for you, yet you're still using it every single day.
I know because I was just like this.
I remember I would go on Snapchat every single day.
I would receive hundreds of pictures from a bunch of strangers that went to my school.
And I would open all these images, see all of their faces, and then I would send my own
image to hundreds of people.
And I would do this all the time, every single day.
And the thing is that I didn't even know why I was doing it.
I just felt like everyone else was expecting me to send them a picture and expecting me
to open their images.
It got so repetitive all the time, sending the same image over and over and over again.
And that wasn't even the worst part.
The worst part was that I would look at every single person's story every single day.
And I would just see all these amazing lives that they led hanging out with people, going
out to eat, doing all this stuff.
And these were people I didn't even know.
I just went to the same school with them.
I've never talked to them in my life.
Yet I was looking at their stories every single day and it was destroying my mental
health because I was getting jealous of the life they lived.
I became attached to them even though I was nothing but a statistic to their view count.
I was so attached to them that it became habit to look at their stories every single day.
And it was destroying my life.
And I knew it too.
So that's when I started to question.
I started to ask myself, who am I doing this for?
How is this going to affect my life?
Why am I even doing this?
And then I started to realize that I couldn't answer these questions.
I didn't know why I was doing it.
So I started to reduce my usage.
And then eventually I just decided to stop sending streaks.
And I was nervous because I had some pretty big streaks, like 100 days, 200 days.
But guess what?
Nobody cared because I was nothing but a number to them.
And then I decided to delete the entire app off of my phone.
And when that happened, it felt good for a couple days.
But it was almost as if for my entire life that I had social media, I was wearing a weighted
vest carrying 20 extra pounds of dead weight all day long every day.
And then when I decided to delete the app, it was almost as if I just put a coat on over
it.
I didn't see the dead weight, but it was still there and it was still affecting my life.
And so after a couple of weeks of being off of social media, I realized that there was
still something nagging at me.
The dead weight was still there.
And so I started questioning again.
I started asking myself, why do I even have this bridge accessible to cross back to my
old life?
Why do I even have the option to go back to my old life?
And I started asking myself these simple questions.
And then after a little bit of this, I realized that I was just holding on to my addiction.
I was just holding on to that possible hope or chance that I might be able to go back to
that life and get addicted again.
And then at that moment, I realized that is absolutely ridiculous.
And at that moment, I took out a piece of paper and started to write down every single
social media account that I had.
And then I went through one by one and permanently deleted all of these accounts.
And it was not easy while I was doing it.
I got to admit, there was a lot of tension that arose in my thought process.
But I kept on questioning.
I was asking myself, well, am I worried that I'm not going to be able to talk to friends
or family?
Or am I just worried about deleting social media because I'm addicted?
And the answer was obvious.
And so I decided to delete everything.
And after eight months of being off of social media, I realized just how bad that was for
me.
It was destroying my life.
And I was so happy with this change that maybe five months ago, I told my friend to
delete all of his accounts as well.
And he did it.
And just the other day, he told me that that was one of the best pieces of advice I had
ever given him.
But you already knew just how bad social media was for you.
You already knew all this stuff that I told you.
Yeah, you're still using social media every single day, but not anymore because it's time
to change.