Quitting SNS for 5 months. What have I learned?

August 03, 2025

It was around the end of February, I scraped all my SNS accounts and going on a 5 months hiatus. It all started from a simple frustration I’ve grown on SNS, it was giving me lots of unnecessary stress and negativity that I don’t want to deal with since I’m already stressed enough with my semester and I want to focus on that, resulting me deactivated most of my SNS.

I had gone thru SNS hiatus countless times in the past, but usually coming back around 1~2 weeks, but a week later…with how I’ve check on with digital minimalism related things and also realized that putting SNS away not only easen up my negativity and stress directly to those but also improved my productivity, since I want to have all my concentration on this semesters so this time I decided to go on a different approach, moved to the backup accounts and not going back to my main accounts until everything is settled.

The bad of SNS & doomscrolling, what’s all about with digital minimalism

SNS is a place where people share the best of themselves, for people who’s not in the best mental condition, that caused an unnecessary amount of stress. Nowadays, Social Media corporations all tried to maximize your screen time on their platform, making you addicted to it and ended up “doomscrolling”, and things doesn’t get better with short-form videos, those basically are fucking with your attention span, I personally really hated that and avoid putting too many times into viewing it.

Digital minimalism, a philosophy that helps you question what digital tools (and behaviors surrounding these tools) add the most value to your life. There’s a lot of different approach with digital minimalism, but they all served a way on reducing screen time, gaining back control on how you use your devices and make the most value out of it instead of waste it all on unnecessary stuffs.

Things I did during my absence on SNS

Surprisingly all I did was deactivated my usual SNS accounts and moved to a backup one, cleaned up few unused apps, moved certain things into a different phone in which I can only access when I’m home (I mostly don’t bring that phone outside) and that’s about it.

Moved to the backup accounts might sounds like you are just moved from one to the other and doesn’t seems to help any. But the reality is, since my backup account doesn’t follow anything that makes me “want” to look into, that eventually makes me not want to open their app/website anymore unless necessary.

About communication with friends, we mostly use Discord nowadays, I also decided to switch to another account so I only have a selection of circles to visit and fewer import friends that can contact me, flitering out any unwanted places/messages that might distract me over.

For a even more harsh time, I even tend to move my SIM card to a different phone (iPhone 13 mini) that doesn’t contain my usual contacts so only a very few selection of friends could message me. That phone could even last an entire day without charge because I pretty much only use it for Discord, take pictures in class or watch YouTube videos while eating.

What have I learned after I finished my semester?

The most important thing definitely are on the way I use SNS, even after I finished my current semester and returned to SNS, I still don’t spend nearly as much time on it compared to before hiatus.

This also make me reconsider a lot on what stuff is actually important to stay on my main devices rather than having them all together in one place, might also going on separate usage on various of devices since I got a bunch laying around or even moving some tasks into single purpose devices, unsure yet, but we’ll see.

That’s about it, I can finally catch some break in my summer vacation…