My 1 year life without social media.

Do I miss checking on newsfeeds?, what is trending on twitter? or latest IG posts from my friends? Do I get bored with regular life?, life without no ding ding?

Before I answer that, let me talk about how my life was with social media. Evidently life was good. Social media was new, everyone was just started using it or learning how to use it from friends.

primarily social media is place so socialize with, right?, -as it intended to be I guess-.

I was privilege enough to meet some awesome friends on Facebook. A lot of friends that actually became my best friends we met at Social media. It was awesome what you could do you with sitting on chair having phone/computer that has an access to the internet, instant chat, likes, shares and sweet comments that could keep you hooked up hours and hours with the platform.

At that time Social media was new to everyone; IG was about to yet become popular, nevertheless, I was actually enjoying being on Facebook, Twitter and WhatsApp. Can we say WhatsApp is part of social media? hmmmm, (does it seem like that?) interesting.

In Facebook I’ve lived in it, before I went to bed and at the moment I open my eyes in the morning, it was like sweet morning coffee that gets you up, that one thing that could keep you in the bed like hours and make you eventually get late.

In five years I couldn’t imagine my life without social media. I was getting good at using social media, its new features, tricks and so on. what works and what doesn’t, what makes people engaged and what makes them withdrawn.

Another thing, dating in Social media was one the sweetest thing I could ever possible do in my life back in the days, -typical teenage boy who has an access to a hundreds of girls at once- (every boys dream) -

NOTE: in Somali regions at that time there was no any other job that you could possibly do in Social Media rather than chatting and connecting with friends.

Social media let me meet with girls and start relationship with them immediately, some relationship we weren’t even in the same city, same culture and some continent.

I guess, I was quit privilege with online dating, my sweet personality (cockiness and funniness) and my accused good looking (photogenic) help me a lot.

Dating was another drug that was keeping me on social media even more, it was ingrained to my daily life. I always had a sweet chats whenever one relationship starts.

But, eventually I started to get irritated with all of these, I grow up and switching from one relationship to another made no sense to me. Posting images and unnecessary contents makes feel stupid when my real life needed my undefined attention and it was breaking down right in front of my eyes.

I was always someone with a great ambition, passion and motivation to do meaningful things in the life of my community and those around me and having these intentions inside my heart while being addicted to social media made me hate myself even more.

Therefore, when I graduated I started to get serious with my life. It was time to seek for real adventure, to emerge life of danger of the uncertainty, rejections and meeting with real people.

In doing so, I started a business. As normal, first business is more likely to fail, therefore, I failed so hard not because of some financial, strategic or execution flaws. but simply because lack of discipline. I was addicted to social media. I lack focus and I am not going to lie, ego was holding me back too.

Business needed focus, and willing to experiment without holding back. I even tried to use digital marketing. Although, I was using digital I couldn’t see any shift of focus from consuming to the productive parts of the digital.

So, finally I decided to delete apps from my phone and tried to focus on starting life from scratch particularly business. Firstly it was hard at that time, I had separation from my main girl, and this thing had me consistently have feelings to check out my social media and my messengers.

After while I got busy on readings, meetings and taking business trainings, I learned how to interact with real life people, how to negotiate and make partnerships. At the end of the day, I began to enjoy that life.

Where I don’t wake up to check up my phone rather than I woke up to exercise, Plan my day, read or simple as to drink water.

In 8 months my life has completely changed, I felt alive, energetic, positive toward life and I was actually getting results. my business was not that successful yet but it was working. Moreover, I befriend with failure, with trying and embracing uncertainty.

The weird thing about that time was, I had approximately 2000 friends in my social media whom we basically chat daily, comment and like each others posts and hype up one another.

None, of my friends have noticed my absence of the platforms except few ones, those we were consistently hanging out in real life, those whom we had deep real life connection outside of social media, it was the time I am kind feel the social media life was fake. fake friends, fake photos, fake contents and fake personality.

That is why it is important to establish a real life friends whom you get to see and meet daily.

Also , there were other few things I noticed that has changed in my life. Things like, I tend to became more present, mindful and at peace. my discipline has increased and my brain stimulus has decreased.

I was in “dopamine fast” as it called today.

Worth to mention, just like any other drug rehab social media has negative side, I felt lonely, boredom, restless and little bit depressed.

To be honest, we humans tend to prefer pain over boredom, boredom is worst situation that any human could ever possibly be;- in where we will seek ways to make ourselves busy rather than be bored-.

That is why it is important to keep your self busy with other activities, a meaningful things. At the end of the day your brain needs to be doing something rather doing nothing.

Lot of people can’t simply go off one day from scowling down newsfeeds, chatting and browsing platforms .

Seems like they have nothing than waking up and living in that virtual and digital world.

Some of us simply get up and without doing anything else we hop up to the one platform to another until we waste 3–4 hours of our precious time.

We got depressed, unmotivated and unwilling to do any meaningful thing rather than lying on our bed with untidy and unclean room, we are in where we can’t even clean our environment, let alone being productive.

The journey was hard but worth taking,

But, back to answer my previous questions. yes!!! I do miss all of that, I don’t need to lie. But, what I learnt and proud of is that I defeated my drug. I experienced and tested the real life, real people and real experience without urge to share it with online people.

Right now it is same for me to be in the social media or out of the social media.

I built a life that has so much activity that I can do to make myself busy and keep myself out of social media, things like meaningful conversions with close friends, families and people, learning, reading, exercising and most importantly focusing on what is important.

We people are weird, even if we know, we tend to show our beautiful parts of our life on social media without notice that no one cares what we do in life, in the contrary, people feel envious.

So I challenge you to sit with your self and do deep analyze with your life.

Are you being controlled by digital platforms particularly Social Media, like, Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, WhatsApp, YouTube etc.

If you are victim like I was, can you delete your accounts for one year?

Thank you for reading.