There wasn’t really one dramatic moment where I decided, That’s it. I’m deleting everything.
It had been building for a while.
Recently, scrolling through social media started making me feel worse about myself more often than it made me feel good. I would see people who looked better than me, or at least people I thought looked better than me, and somehow their existence became evidence of everything I thought I was lacking. I would look at their faces, their bodies, their clothes, their lives, and without even consciously trying to, I would compare myself.
Then there were the couples. People being loved openly. People going on dates. People posting their partners. Little videos of somebody looking at somebody else like they were the most important person in the room. And I would look at my own life.
Single. Alone.
And somewhere along the way, the thought stopped being simply, I wish I had that. It became, Why don’t I have that? And eventually:
What is wrong with me? Why am I not enough?
I know logically that somebody else’s happiness doesn’t take anything away from me. Someone being attractive doesn’t make me unattractive. Someone being in a relationship doesn’t mean I’m unworthy of one.
I know all of that.
But knowing something and feeling it are apparently two very different things. I started noticing something in myself that I didn’t particularly like.
Resentment.
Not necessarily toward the people themselves. Most of them hadn’t done anything wrong. They were just living their lives. But I had reached a point where I couldn’t look at somebody else’s happiness without immediately using it as a measuring stick against my own.
And that was exhausting.
Then something happened that made me think about social media from another angle entirely. One night, I was DJing. I was doing something I genuinely enjoy, recording little pieces of the night like I normally would. Nothing about this video felt significant when I took it. It was just another moment I wanted to share.
Looking at it now, there is something strange about how ordinary it looks. I’m behind the decks. Music is playing. People are around me, talking, drinking, existing in the background. At the time, that was all it was to me.
Just a video.
But something happening quietly in the background was noticed by people watching my story. Those people interpreted what they saw and brought it to the attention of someone involved. What followed became something much bigger offline.
I don’t want to tell that story here because, ultimately, it isn’t completely mine to tell.
But being unintentionally caught somewhere in the middle of it stayed with me. Something I had recorded casually, without thinking twice about what was happening behind me, suddenly carried meaning I had never intended it to carry. And I kept thinking about that.
A camera can capture five seconds of somebody’s life without capturing anything that came before it or anything that happened afterwards.
It doesn’t capture the conversation. It doesn’t capture the context. It doesn’t capture what anybody was thinking. It simply captures whatever happened to be visible from one particular angle at one particular moment. But once those five seconds are online, people can look at them.
Interpret them.
Discuss them.
Send them to somebody else.
Point something out.
Create assumptions.
And sometimes those assumptions make their way back into people’s actual lives.
There was something uncomfortable about realising that. And then I realised I had been doing my own version of exactly the same thing.
Every time I looked at somebody attractive and decided they had something I didn’t.
Every time I saw a couple smiling together and assumed their relationship represented everything I was missing.
Every time somebody else’s carefully selected moment made me question whether I was enough.
I was also looking at fragments of people’s lives and creating an entire story from them.
I didn’t know what happened before those photos.
I didn’t know what happened afterwards.
I didn’t know whether the couple smiling at each other had argued twenty minutes earlier.
I didn’t know whether the person whose appearance made me insecure had spent that morning hating their own reflection.
I didn’t really know anything beyond what happened to appear on my screen.
And yet somehow I kept comparing their fragment to the entirety of my own life.
Maybe that’s one of the strangest things about social media. We all become observers of one another.
Everybody watching everybody.
Everybody interpreting everybody.
Everybody comparing.
Sometimes something completely ordinary becomes significant simply because enough people are looking at it.
And suddenly this thing that was supposed to be somewhere I posted photos, music, stupid little moments and pieces of my life felt incredibly heavy. I just didn’t want to participate in it for a while.
The strange thing is that I still want to share.
I still want to take pictures of my day.
I still want somewhere to put the random thoughts that come into my head.
I still want to document my DJ sessions, the songs I’m listening to, things I’ve discovered, places I’ve been, stupid little moments that probably mean nothing to anybody except me.
I don’t actually want to disappear.
I think I just don’t want to perform anymore.
And lately, I’ve been tired.
Not just physically tired.
I’ve been losing interest in things that normally make me feel like myself. Going to the gym. Reading. Cooking. Things I genuinely enjoy suddenly feel like things that require energy I don’t seem to have.
I’ve been sleeping more and somehow still waking up tired.
I’ve been withdrawing.
I’ve been more irritable.
And when my mind is already in that kind of place, maybe endlessly consuming carefully selected fragments of everybody else’s lives isn’t exactly helping.
So today, I deactivated my social media.
Not because I suddenly hate everyone.
Not because I’m making some grand statement about how social media is destroying society.
And not because I want people to wonder where I went.
I just think I need some distance.
I need somewhere I can experience my life without immediately wondering how it looks from somebody else’s screen.
Maybe that’s what this blog is going to be.
Social media always made me think about how other people would see what I posted.
Here, I want to think about how future me will see it.
Maybe years from now I’ll find this entry and laugh at how seriously everything felt.
Maybe I’ll barely remember what happened.
Maybe I’ll be in love.
Maybe I’ll feel completely comfortable with how I look.
Maybe I’ll have entirely different problems.
I don’t know.
But wherever I am when I eventually read this again, I hope I remember the person writing it.
The version of me who was exhausted, comparing himself to everyone, feeling like he wasn’t enough, and eventually realised that maybe he didn’t need to keep staring at the things that were making him feel that way.
The version of me who started wondering whether seeing more of everybody else’s lives was actually helping him understand the world better, or whether it was simply giving him more fragments to overthink.
So I logged out.
And instead of posting my life for everybody else to see,
I started writing it down for myself.