9 Convincing Reasons Not To Be On Social Media

I remember it. When Friendster took the world by storm, I hooked myself up with an account in 2003 to see what the fuss was all about.

It was a pretty fresh concept that allowed users to create a personal profile and “make more friends”. But pretty soon, I found it to have a negative impact on my life, deleted my account, and never looked back.

Don’t get me wrong. It does add value to life. But the amount of value it takes away outstrips the value it adds.

Ever since then, I have never signed up for any other social media networking sites except for work purposes. And I want to add that because of work requirements, I have become pretty familiar with operating social media accounts… yet I don’t have my own accounts.

Friends have always asked me why I don’t have a presence on Facebook or Twitter. I often just shake my head and say something in the lines of “I have better things to do”.

And to tell you the truth, I feel that the real answer is obvious… It’s one of those topics we know, but either seldom have the words to describe it, or refuse to admit it.

Here are 9 of the biggest reasons to avoid using social media, and quit if you are already on it.

1) It is too much of a distraction

If you cannot help yourself but check your news feeds or tweets every time you get a notification, you have already sold your soul to the devil.

If you are in transit or waiting for sleep to take over you in bed, and have absolutely nothing else to do, I’d admit that checking out what your friends are saying about themselves and their day can be amusing.

But if social media has turned you into a social zombie who constantly gets distracted from whatever you are doing, you really need to review your priorities.

I’m of course, nobody to offer advice to anyone on life.

But if you are so hooked on news feeds that you don’t pay enough attention to the person having dinner with you, the manager presenting the marketing strategy in the meeting room, your stop to get off when you are already late for work, or your dog who was waiting for you all day to get home and play, I think you should really review how you are using social media.

The amount of power left in the mobile charger even stresses you more than meeting an important deadline!

If you really cannot bear to close your accounts, at least make an effort to manage your utilization of it.

Like a resourceful manager would manage his time by scheduling when to check emails, what time slots to schedule meetings, and when to hold sales meetings, you can apply time management to your life too.

Turn off notifications. And only check your feeds during time slots you have decided on.

2) You are opening yourself up to unpaid overtime

When the smartphone revolution started to really turn it’s wheels, my friends were all using Whatsapp and asked me to get it too.

And I did. Little did I know what kind of trouble I was signing up for.

Because clients, prospects, vendors, colleagues, etc, all started to bombard me with work related chats throughout the day… and into the night. And it was as if I was obligated to respond immediately.

Someone once even gave me an ear-full for not responding to a message at 2 in the morning. And it was on a subject that was not even an urgent matter.

Ridiculous.

I was doing pretty well for myself at work without all these instant messages.  And after installing a mobile app, I had so much other stuff to contend with that do not add anything to the bottom line.

I acknowledge that some types of professions require employees to be on call 24/7. But if you are not required to work after office hours, making yourself available via these instant messenger apps does not help you in anyway. Anyway, if there is something really urgent, people are going to call you.

Uninstall.

3) You avoid nurturing the unhealthy habit of craving social approval

One of the best ultimate advises that older folks have for the younger generation is not to care about what others think about them.

Social media is the complete opposite of that.

• Does the lack of shares and likes on your posts disappoint you?
• Do you feel obligated to comment on things even when you don’t feel like it?
• Do you share your travel selfies secretly wanting others to envy you?
• Do you add friends just so to boost your friend count?

There are many more questions like those above that I can list down. But the point is that if you don’t answer a resounding “No” to any of them, you’ve already fallen into the social trap.

Now you can argue that it’s just fun and nothing worth pondering about. But psychologists would argue otherwise.

If given a choice, everyone would prefer to have social approval. It’s natural human instincts. But it gets unhealthy when disapproval affects your state of mind.

If the habit of needing social approval is kept unchecked, it can negatively affect your character development… unless you already believe that you are already the greatest and there is no room for anymore improvement…

4) You don’t get exploited by networks and advertisers

If you don’t already know, social networks need to generate an income to sustain their operations. And almost all of them monetize their traffic by “selling” your personal information.

As if joining them to beef up their member counts and sending their stock prices through the roof is not enough reciprocation.

Social networks sell advertising space by allowing advertisers to target members from things like browser history, interests you listed on your profile, your age, gender, your friends connected to you, etc.

The more active you are on their networks, the more details you reveal about yourself, and the more ads they can show you!

It’s not illegal by any means… you agreed to being shadowed by them when signing up after “reading” through their 500-page terms and conditions.

Advertisers then show you clickbait display ads that lead you to questionable sites that sell fluff.

I’m not against social networks selling ad space. They need to put food on the table after all.

But the manner many of them go about this leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Now third-party advertisers can even grab your email address for their own database without you needing to explicitly enter it. Those that respect privacy would then give you some way to unsubscribe. Shady advertisers would throw you into their database and spam you for eternity with emails that promise to make you $35,373 in 7 days.

5) You have time to do things that really matter

I think we are all very lucky to live in the current era. It is a period of dramatic technological advancement.

Imagine that people were communicating with landlines and snail mail for decades till the mid 1990s. Then the internet came along and became available to the masses. Then it was quickly followed by mobile networks made affordable to the masses and mobile data. Optic fiber took things up another notch. Even cheaper flights have made the world a much smaller place in the last decade.

If you were born before the 1990s, you would have experienced the world without the internet and when cellphones were only meant for the rich. Those experiences are something to treasure and something that the generation born today will never experience in a developed country.

I missed the days when a friend was a real natural person instead of just a photo and text on the mobile phone. Yet I cannot imagine today without my mobile computers and devices.

The point I’m trying to make is that although the world has changed dramatically over the last decade or 2, we don’t have to let technology deprive us of the things that really make us happy.

Social media, although a breakthrough technology, shouldn’t be allowed to take up too much of our time… Time that can be used to go out and do things that really matter.

6) You avoid being stalked by the social “police”

Surely you have read the many news reports of people getting into trouble with posts and comments they made on social media?

Among many of the events that are forced onto people, it include getting sacked by their employers, having to leave the country to escape public backlash, having private photos distributed to strangers all over the world, etc.

If you think that the things you share on social media is limited to the users connected to you, you are completely wrong.

Because your friends connected to you can share your stuff with those connected to them, and so on. The sharing can continue (depending on how viral that content actually is) till your posts get distributed throughout the world.

I don’t know why friends are motivated to do this. It probably has something to do with wishing failure upon you. But even if you speak freely and make a simple innocent comment, people who loathe you can knowingly misread what you are saying and share your misinterpreted comments for the world to hate on.

Even strangers make it their duty to expose people who have an opinion other than what is politically correct… as if it’s a crime to have your own opinion.

Perhaps it’s human nature that people like to tell on others just to bring them down… even when they are not a threat or someone they know personally. Sometimes the only way to feel good about yourself is to see others fall below you.

So if you can’t be yourself and have to watch what you say with friends online, can someone remind me what is the purpose of social media again?

7) You become a mystery

Why would you want people to read you like an open book?

I just find people who judge you or decide something for you just because they think they know you to be really annoying.

It doesn’t matter how much information you put up online. People will judge you based on the information you have made available.

This means that if you share an article about how real estate agents are celebrating the rise of property prices, people will assume that you work for the evil establishment. If you laugh at how funny kitten is reacting to cucumbers, pet lovers will label you as a sadist. And when you disagree with a government policy, strangers might insist that you are anti-government.

Before you know it, the social “police” will be on you like a pack of wolves.

It’s much better to just not step into this world of chaos and self-righteous people to get a little peace of mind.

People won’t be able to call you names online when you are a mystery.

8) You avoid being preyed on by scammers

The masses of people having social media accounts makes it a playground for scammers to find targets. And no matter how careful you are, on a bad day, it only takes a moment of madness for you to be baited and reeled in.

A click on a bad link or response to a robot can potentially turn your world upside down.

And don’t insist that you will be able to identify the bad stuff from the good. Because as mentioned in point #4, advertisers will know what demographic you belong in and what interest you. This enables them to create ad campaigns that will entice someone like you to respond.

Getting routed to questionable websites can infect you with malware. Keyloggers can record your passwords and keystrokes. There are even programs that can inject a virus into your system without you needing to click on anything.

The deep web is something that the average individual (including me) cannot comprehend.

I’d just minimize my exposure just to be on the safe side.

9) Social media is a distortion of reality

The day might come where social media essentially becomes life. But that is not today.

The biggest problem with being too engrossed in social media is how it does not present a true account of the world we live in.

If you have a high friend-count full of people you don’t really know, you might be lazy to to go out and make more real friends or strengthen the existing relationships with real friends in the real world.

And if you see someone you miss being active on social media, you might stop yourself from reaching out thinking that he/she must be too busy to attend to you. Little do you know that he/she is as lonely as a tiger whose friend list is just filled with superficial acquaintances just like you.

And you might assume that a friend has recently visited Japan just because she posted a picture of Japan. So you didn’t invite her to tag along with your trip. When in reality, it was just a picture she found online and would have gone with you if you had asked.

If we depend on social media to inform us of what’s going on with the people around us, we will never really know what’s going on. Does that make sense?