How to Have a Social Life Without Social Media End of Article
Screenshot of 50501's post: Meta is an unethical company run by Peter Thiel’s techno-fascist billionaire protégé—Mark Zuckerberg—and is part of the Trump regime’s surveillance state. It’s time to leave Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp—and while you’re at it, drop Amazon, Google, and OpenAI as well.
Screenshot of 50501's post: Meta is an unethical company run by Peter Thiel’s techno-fascist billionaire protégé—Mark Zuckerberg—and is part of the Trump regime’s surveillance state. It’s time to leave Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp—and while you’re at it, drop Amazon, Google, and OpenAI as well.

How to Have a Social Life Without Social Media

After years of relying on social media to moderate our social lives, it can seem impossible to disentangle the third wheel without losing all our friends, relatives, and easy dopamine drip buttons. I’m here to tell you: A social life without social media is a much better one.

A friend replied to the article How to Fight the Broligarchy from 50501 with a question I’ve been asked many times since I wrote How to Delete Facebook and Instagram Without Regret.

I have found that divesting from these platforms has directly impacted my social wellbeing and ability to stay connected to friends and family. How do folks balance this aspect? As a GenX less dependent on socials, I often feel alienated and lonely the more I divest, as my younger friends have not.

mandilou22.bsky.social

My Reply

It’s important to replace them with direct contact with friends and family. Start chat groups over text or Signal. Plan an outing. Catch up with an old friend. Fill that scrolling time with something that makes you feel good. When we leave emptiness behind, relapse begins.

I view my experience with these platforms as addictions. It was hard to admit it while I was still on them, but once I did it made the difficulty I felt pulling away from them make much more sense. Think of how alcoholics struggle to find safe ways to hang out with their friends without going to bars or drinking parties. This is eerily similar, and that’s by design.

For more details about my recommendations for having a social life without social media, check out the Prepare Pragmatically section of the article. We have to be more proactive about keeping in touch, but it gets easier fast once you get things rolling.

You can do it.

To repeat another part:

A few “one-click friends” didn’t reply or reach out to me when I sent out my call for staying in touch — a few dozen out of my three-hundred-or-so Facebook Friends™. They may still catch up with me some day, of course, but so far they don’t seem to miss me enough to look me up.

On the flipside, my direct interactions with friends IRL has increased. And communicating via text messages, emails, and other platforms has been way better than the ones I had on Facebook and Instagram.