Why I Deleted Social Media and What Happened Next

Why I Deleted Social Media and What Happened Next

Three years ago, at sixty-two, I did something that felt almost reckless: I deleted every social media app from my phone and shut down my accounts. No Facebook. No Instagram. No Twitter. My children thought I’d lost my mind. My friends said I was making a mistake. But standing here now, on the far side of that decision, I can tell you it was one of the most clarifying choices I’ve made in decades.

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Last updated: 2026-03-23

In my thirty-plus years as a journalist, I watched the media landscape transform entirely. I reported on the rise of the internet, covered the smartphone revolution, and documented how social platforms rewired human connection itself. I understood, intellectually, what was happening. But understanding something and living it are two different things. It wasn’t until I stepped away completely that I grasped what we’ve collectively lost—and gained—in this digital age.

This isn’t a sermon about how social media is evil. That’s too simple, and I’ve never been one for simplicity. This is about what happened to my life, my mind, and my relationships when I decided to opt out. And perhaps more importantly, what I discovered about the person I’d become in the constant performance of digital living.

The Slow Drift Into Digital Compulsion

I didn’t join social media reluctantly. When I first created a Facebook account in the late 2000s, I was genuinely excited. As a journalist, I saw it as a tool for connection and news gathering. Twitter felt revolutionary—real-time conversations about current events with sources, colleagues, and readers. I used these platforms seriously, professionally.

But somewhere between 2015 and 2018, something shifted. The compulsion crept in like fog. I found myself reaching for my phone during morning coffee. Checking notifications before I’d fully woken. Scrolling during editorial meetings—yes, during meetings I was supposedly leading. I rationalized it all as staying informed, staying connected, staying relevant.

The insidious part? I didn’t feel addicted. I felt engaged. There’s a difference, and that difference is precisely why social media platforms are engineered the way they are. They’re designed to feel purposeful while being fundamentally compulsive. During my KATUSA service decades earlier, we didn’t have such distractions, and I remember the absolute clarity of those days—the presence, the focus. I’d somehow forgotten what that felt like.

My daughter, who studies psychology, sent me an article about dopamine and variable reward schedules. She was worried about me, though she was gentle about it. The data was striking: the average person checks their phone 96 times per day. That’s once every ten minutes. For knowledge workers, it’s higher. I realized I was part of that statistic, and the realization was uncomfortable.

The Decision Point and the Fear That Followed

The moment I decided to delete social media wasn’t dramatic. It was quiet. I was sitting in a café in Bukchon, that beautiful old neighborhood in Seoul, and I watched a family of four across the room. Three of them were looking at their phones. The grandmother—perhaps in her eighties—was the only one looking around, observing. She caught my eye and smiled. I smiled back. In that fifteen-second exchange, I felt more genuinely connected than I had in months of online interaction.

That evening, I told my wife I was going to delete everything. She asked the practical questions: “Won’t you miss updates from friends? What about staying informed about news? How will you stay in touch with people?” All valid concerns. All fears I shared.

But I realized something crucial: I had my wife’s phone number. I had my children’s email addresses. I had my closest friends’ contact information. If something truly important happened, these people would reach me. The mythology of social media—that it’s necessary for connection—dissolves the moment you examine it honestly. Our grandparents maintained deep relationships for generations without it.

The fear, though. That was real. I was afraid of being forgotten. Afraid of missing out. Afraid of becoming irrelevant—a fear that feels particularly acute when you’re older and facing the natural diminishment that comes with age. Social media promised to keep me visible, connected, young in some abstract way. Letting it go meant accepting a different kind of existence.

The First Thirty Days: Withdrawal and Recalibration

I won’t romanticize this—the first month was genuinely difficult. I reached for my phone out of pure habit. My thumb would slide where the apps used to be, and I’d feel that tiny jolt of disorientation. I attended a retirement party for a colleague and felt oddly unmoored. Everyone was taking photos for their Instagram stories. I was just… standing there, experiencing the moment. It felt foreign.

There were practical adjustments. I had to explicitly ask friends to text me important information rather than assuming I’d see it on social media. I set up RSS feeds for news sources I genuinely cared about—The Korea Times, the BBC, NPR. No algorithms curating my reality. Just the raw news, in the order it was published. I had to be intentional about staying informed.

But something unexpected happened around day twenty-one: I stopped reaching for my phone. Not entirely—I still needed it for calls, messaging, maps. But the compulsive checking dissolved. That phantom vibration feeling? Gone by week three.

More surprisingly, my sleep improved almost immediately. I’d been working in newsrooms for decades where information is currency, so sleeping with my phone by the bed had been normal for years. Without the evening scroll, without the 3 a.m. check-in with world news, my nervous system actually calmed down. I started sleeping seven, sometimes eight hours. I forgot what that felt like.

What I Gained: The Unexpected Gifts

When people ask why I deleted social media, I usually talk about what I lost—the notifications, the FOMO, the sense of being constantly evaluated. But the more interesting story is what I gained. These weren’t gifts I expected or sought. They emerged in the space that opened up.

Reading returned to my life in a serious way. Not scrolling through shallow takes on Medium, but actual books. In the past three years, I’ve read more than I did in the previous decade. I’m rereading Montaigne, finally finished Knausgård’s My Struggle series, worked through most of Pico Iyer’s essay collections. There’s something about sustained attention that social media dissolves. Your brain, freed from the constant stimulation, suddenly hungers for depth again.

My conversations became richer. I’d have lunch with a friend and we’d actually finish thoughts. We wouldn’t be interrupted by the ding of notifications. We’d make plans and show up without documenting the experience. These conversations go places now—tangential, surprising, human places. I’ve reconnected with friends I’d lost touch with through email, through actual phone calls. These interactions feel less performative, more genuine.

I rediscovered boredom, and it transformed into creativity. Boredom is something our culture has declared war on, but boredom is where ideas live. I started writing more. I began taking longer walks through neighborhoods without music or podcasts—just observation. I took up photography again, something I’d neglected for years. Without the need to curate and post, I took photos just because they interested me, and that interest led somewhere unexpected.

My anxiety declined noticeably. This is well-documented in the research—social comparison is a feature, not a bug, of social media, and it corrodes well-being. Without the constant stream of others’ highlighted reels, I stopped feeling inadequate about my own aging, my retirement, my small life in comparison to carefully constructed online personas. I became okay with who I actually am, not who I might appear to be.

The Unexpected Challenges and Honest Limitations

I want to be truthful about the costs. There have been real ones.

Professionally, stepping away from social media meant stepping away from a certain kind of relevance. I’m not quoted as much. My bylines don’t circulate through networks the way they once might have. For someone who spent a lifetime building professional reputation, that’s a real loss. I’ve made peace with it by being more deliberate about pitching ideas to editors, more direct in my professional networking. It’s slower, more old-fashioned, and it works.

Socially, there’s an odd liminal space I occupy now. My acquaintances—and there’s a difference between acquaintances and friends—often assume I know less about what’s happening in their lives because I’m not following their updates. Some people feel less connected to me because our relationship no longer exists in digital space. I’ve had to accept that a certain category of connection has been sacrificed.

I won’t pretend I don’t sometimes feel a twinge of curiosity about what’s circulating online, what people are discussing, what trend I’m missing. But that curiosity passes, and I notice it always passes. The fear of missing out is real in the moment but evanescent in practice.

Staying Deleted in a Connected World

Three years in, people still ask if I’ll ever go back. The answer is no, though I say it without evangelicalism. This works for me. I’m not suggesting it’s right for everyone, and I’m certainly not suggesting that social media is intrinsically evil. People have built genuine communities online. Artists have found audiences. Activists have organized movements. The tool itself is neutral.

But for me, why I deleted social media boils down to this: the cost-benefit analysis shifted. The marginal benefit of another scroll, another notification, another opportunity to be evaluated, declined while the costs—attention, sleep, peace of mind, authentic presence—rose. At some point, that equation becomes untenable.

What happened next has been a slow return to an older way of being human. It’s less spectacular than I imagined. It’s mostly unremarkable: a life of reading, conversation, work that matters to me, walks through Seoul’s changing seasons, meals with people I love where everyone is actually present.

This is how humans lived for thousands of years, and we didn’t suffer from missing the digital constant. We just lived. Fully, if imperfectly. Present, if sometimes lonely. Bored, sometimes, but capable of great focus and creativity.

I don’t know if this resonates with you. I suspect it might, simply because you’re reading this on the internet, which means you understand its pull and perhaps its emptiness too. But I’ll say this: if you’re curious about why I deleted social media, try it yourself. Not forever, necessarily. Just for a month. See what happens. See what you miss and what you don’t. See who reaches out and who forgets you. See who you become when you’re not constantly performing.

The answer might surprise you.