Deactivated: 30 days without social media

I killed @karaortiga for 30 days. I logged off all my social media accounts (Facebook, Twitter and Instagram). My measly 200-plus followers weren’t going to have a breakdown without me anyway. And since my smartphone had conked out too, and I was forced to downgrade to a Nokia that was not so smart; this meant I was also out of any kind of chat room (Viber, WhatsApp, Line).

The 30 days went by and when it was over, this is how I imagined celebrating day 31: a dramatic countdown to 12 midnight with some friends, toasting to bubbly as they cheer me on and I ceremoniously log back in to all my accounts, high fives everywhere. But the reality was something like this: me missing the 12 midnight countdown, only remembering the next day during my lunch break, and actually feeling fearful about logging back in. By day 30, I had gotten so used to the routine of life without social media, it felt almost like a new experience coming back in. I was itching to check my news feed, but there was a huge part of me that was also worried that I would become a slave to it again.

Because this is what I realized: social media is noise. You don’t actually care about 90 percent of the people on your friends list. You don’t. They don’t even cross your mind. And the handful who do make an effort to see you and have conversations with you are face-to-face with anyway. They schedule you into their lives like, you know, real friends would do. During the 30 days, I became so appreciative of these people — those who would meet up for dinner or drinks, text randomly to ask how I am, those who would craft poetic e-mails to tell me about their day, and even the friends who still wanted to link me a stupid YouTube video, so they’d e-mail it to me instead (which is, really, too much work for a video of a snapping turtle). On social media, information about people you don’t care about is being forced on you every day. And the clincher is, it’s all projections. Everything online is a virtual projection of one’s “self.” So I’m not only bombarded with information about people I normally wouldn’t really think about, but I’m stuck with their projected realities. Stuck with their histrionics.

That’s another thing. Being seen. Parties, dinners, catch-ups, trying out the newest restaurant, going on a trip to the beach — a lot of people do these things not so much to experience them, but so that they can show and tell other people. I remember around Day 18 I went on a trip with a friend, and he spent the entire dinnertime editing a photo we had taken earlier, and urging me to help him come up with a caption. We were about to leave dinner without coming up with a caption and, I swear, I was going to throw a fit. I didn’t just spend the entire dinner debating over which copy point would best accompany that photo of your face and you not deciding after dessert!

The thing is, though, sometimes I like the noise of social media. For the most of my 30 days, life was quiet. I really did feel the silence. Lying on my bed staring at my laptop and struggling to find something to do with it. If I wasn’t going to go on Facebook, where was I going to go? Who was I going to talk to at 2 a.m. about Miley Cyrus’s latest scandal?

I had to learn to entertain myself, and I didn’t know how. I started reading the news. And then reading became the only thing that would keep me entertained. I started reading long-form journalism again, and I felt I cured my shortened attention span. I saw so many random things: Oprah’s interview with the Kardashians, Ninoy Aquino’s last phone call, stories on two gymnasts living in North Korea, a bunch of 9/11 survival stories, a full-profile on Jon Stewart, how to perfect the grilled cheese sandwich. Maybe the stories weren’t at par with hashtag trendy standards, but they were stories I loved to read.

Deactivating from social media was a productive, boring, peaceful, and curious 30 days of my life. But it reminds you that, yes, there is a real world out there, real conversations to be made, real experiences to dive into. You should go out and start living it.