Six Months Without Social Media: An Honest Review
In April I deleted Instagram, Twitter/X, and TikTok from my phone. Not deactivated — just removed the apps. The accounts still exist. I just made them inconvenient to access.
Six months later, here’s the honest version.
What Got Better
Sleep. Almost immediately. I hadn’t realised how often I was reaching for my phone at 11pm and emerging 45 minutes later, vaguely anxious about nothing in particular.
Attention span. I can read for longer stretches without feeling the itch to check something. This surprised me more than anything else. I thought my short attention span was just who I was now. Apparently it was trained.
Mood baseline. Harder to measure, but I feel less vaguely dissatisfied than I used to. I think a lot of that was ambient comparison — other people’s holidays, bodies, careers, lives — that I was absorbing without noticing.
What Didn’t Change
I didn’t become more productive in some dramatic, life-changing way. I didn’t write a novel or learn a language with all my freed-up time. Mostly I replaced scrolling with other low-effort activities — reading, podcasts, staring out the window.
What I Miss
Genuinely nothing, which is the thing that surprised me most. I thought I’d miss feeling connected. I don’t. The people I actually care about communicate through other means.
Would I Recommend It?
Yes, but with a caveat: the first two weeks are uncomfortable in a way that tells you something. Sit with that feeling instead of immediately filling the gap.
About
Network Entropology (n.): The study of chaos in data network systems; the discipline concerned with understanding how order degrades, complexity accumulates, and entropy propagates across connected infrastructure, and the practice of bringing order back to it. A field that exists whether or not its practitioners know they are in it.