This article is about social media. Wait! Before you turn the page, this is not another thinkpiece about mental health. That angle has been done to death, dissected and stitched back together so many times that we all know it inside and out.
I didn’t delete social media for mental health reasons. I just needed to focus on my final university assignments. But what started as a temporary break soon became a personal challenge: how long could I last without logging back in?
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The longer I stayed offline, the more I noticed my life was changing. My friendships felt different, my identity felt clearer and my opinions felt more my own. Social media, I realised, had been shaping it all.
Do I know you?
I moved alone from New York to Melbourne in 2019. As someone in a new city with no friends, social media became my lifeline. Even though I only really knew a fraction of my followers (and none of the influencers I followed), I felt more connected to them than the strangers I sat next to on the tram.
I scrolled through countless hours of content about other people’s lives until it felt like I simultaneously knew everything about everyone and nothing at all. I’d feel so socially drained after putting down my phone that I’d have no desire to go out and mingle.
It turns out digital burnout is a real thing. Our brains aren’t wired to know everything about everyone all the time. Robin Dunbar, a British anthropologist famous for his research on the topic, argues that human beings have limits to social connectedness.
While we can recognise up to 1,500 people, we can only maintain about 150 meaningful relationships – that’s 150 people you wouldn’t feel weird joining for a drink if you ran into them at the pub. Only about five of these can be truly intimate.
Sydney-based clinical psychologist Dr Maria-Elena Lukeides tells me that Dunbar’s number essentially means our brains have a built-in social bandwidth.
“Social media creates this illusion of endless connection but our cognitive capacity hasn’t evolved as quickly as technology. That’s why scrolling can feel so overwhelming. We’re trying to process way more social information than our brains are designed to handle,” she says.
So, while we’re tapping through Instagram Stories and giving mental real estate to hundreds of people we only sort of know, Dr Lukeides warns we run the risk of neglecting our deeper, face-to-face relationships.
This could explain why parasocial relationships (the one-sided connections between you and Paul Mescal or the Scandi influencers you follow) are on the rise. Influencers tend to share content that’s easier to digest than real life. Sometimes it’s aspirational, sometimes it’s messy, but it’s always perfectly and succinctly edited for your entertainment.
Parasocial relationships with these influencers involve no lulls, awkward moments or confrontations, and minimal effort from you. Besides their obvious appeal, Dr Lukeides says parasocial bonds can even be beneficial, offering a sense of connectedness and community, especially for those who feel socially isolated.
However, overreliance on them (or other digital relationships we can simply ‘log out’ of) can lead to dissatisfaction with the IRL relationships that require emotional investment, vulnerability and time to fully blossom. Since deleting social media, my world has become smaller. Without the low-effort upkeep of likes and Story replies, some of my relationships have naturally ended. But the friendships I’ve held on to – and the ones I’ve built since – feel richer and more intentional.
Bore-core
On social media, we encounter an onslaught of content designed to sell us a new identity every other week. There’s a constant pressure to build a personality based on your style, rather than using your style as an authentic expression of your personality. I’m not immune. Hand-knitted sweater vests, vintage prairie dresses and grey blazers pulled straight from my TikTok For You Page are all collecting dust in my wardrobe back home.
You can probably imagine these items in the worlds their corresponding ‘-cores’ inhabit: the hallowed halls of a prestigious university, a sun-drenched field of wildflowers, a cafe in Stockholm. I’d convinced myself these pieces were invitations into these worlds, that I’d seamlessly fall into these lifestyles by cosplaying the right aesthetic.
I bought into the illusion that clothes could magically transform who I am – an illusion designed by capitalism and one that Gen Z is particularly vulnerable to. According to Melbourne-based marketing and brand strategy consultant Eugene Healey, Gen Z was born into an advertising era based on ‘loose identity formation’.
Brands don’t just sell products, they sell aspirational identities that are strong enough to drive a sale but flimsy enough to dissolve when something new comes on the market. These loose identities are based not on who you are but on who you want to be. Case in point: 2024’s Birkin bag charm trend.
As a style icon, Jane Birkin exuded romance and freedom. Her own eponymous handbag, the design gifted to her by Hermès in 1984, was covered in stickers, charms and wear-and-tear from years of use. TikTokers who wanted to adopt her bohemian identity had an easy solution: ‘Birkin-ifying’ their bags by beating them against concrete footpaths and purchasing a diverse collection of keychains as quickly as possible.
Can Jane Birkin’s lifetime of curated style be boiled down to a few hours of online shopping? Does throwing a neutral cardigan around the shoulders of a white button-up really give you the aura of old money? Of course not. Inauthenticity is visible from a mile away.
We often feel like being authentic means being unique, but maybe that’s not true. This past year, I’ve discovered that my personal style is super boring. I love a neutral colour palette, oversized silhouettes and above all, comfort. I love wearing T-shirts and sneakers and a maximum of one accessory. Most of all, I love that my covetous pursuit of new stuff (and the faux identities attached to it) has come to an end.
Echo, echo, echo…
Are your opinions yours? Like, really yours? Are they based on fact? How do you know? AI-generated content is surging across social media platforms. Of course, you and I aren’t fooled by the unsettling images of plasticine puppies or Coke bottle sculptures that seem to dominate boomer newsfeeds. We scoff when Aunt Susan comments, “Amen!” on a picture of Jesus praying over a crew of flight attendants. We would never be duped by such an obvious grift. Or would we?
Social media has become my generation’s primary news source. But despite our presumed internet savvy, studies show that young people are actually more likely to be led astray by misinformation than their older counterparts. Gen Z’s media literacy rate is shockingly low, with 36 per cent struggling to differentiate real headlines from fake ones – a concerning statistic for a generation addicted to media consumption.
We’ve seen social media weaponised to radicalise Gen Z men, enticing them with unchecked half-truths and conspiracies. Once ensnared, this extremism is difficult to escape. Ollie* had to claw his way out of the alt-right pipeline. “My algorithms locked me in an echo chamber and fed me content like ‘Social Justice Warrior Destroyed by Common Sense’,” he says. “It took a serious, deliberate effort to find content that presented strong opposing arguments.”
I’m fascinated by algorithms and how they seem to know you better than you know yourself. But it’s difficult to tell whether algorithms reflect or shape who we are. One thing I’m sure of is they rarely show you the whole picture. “The algorithm appealed to my desire to see myself as an intelligent, rational individual and also a darker desire to see people I deemed ‘entitled’ get their comeuppance,” Ollie tells me. “I now see this was a very curated, bad-faith representation of ideas.”
Like boomers on Facebook and men like Ollie, I’m not exempt from falling for smear campaigns, photoshopped tweets that confirm my existing biases and rumours that make too much sense to question. Stepping back from social media closed the door to a world of overwhelm. Without the noise, I’ve had to think more critically about what I hear and what I believe. Some of my opinions have grown stronger. Others, I’ve realised, are worth changing.
What now?
My friends keep asking if I plan to reactivate my personal accounts after a year offline. To be honest, probably not. Though I feel disconnected from much of the world, I’m more connected to the parts that matter to me than ever before.
Tomorrow, I’m meeting a friend who’s been in Japan for a month. I’m sure she’s posted dozens of photos online, but I haven’t seen any of them. I’ll make her a chai, and we’ll sit on my couch while she tells me everything I’ve missed. We’ll chat until it’s time to say goodbye, and in a few weeks, we’ll find ourselves here again.
*Name has been changed.
This article was originally published in Fashion Journal issue 196.
For more on resetting your relationship with social media, try this.
This article I tapped out of social media for a year, here’s how my life changed appeared first on Fashion Journal.
2025-03-14 04:30:00
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