How I Think No. 002 - Why I left social media and never looked back.

About two years ago I deleted my Instagram and TikTok accounts. I still use YouTube and Pinterest, so this is not a story about rejecting the internet or going off grid. It is a more specific story about why I decided to stop building my life and my business around platforms whose entire design is built to keep you scrolling indefinitely.

I want to tell you what actually pushed me out. Not the research reasons, not the data, not the think pieces about algorithm design. The real reason.

One afternoon I looked up and realized I had spent two hours on a stranger's profile page. Not a celebrity. Just a random person I had somehow stumbled onto. Within those two hours I knew about her past, her family, her friends, her relationships, where she had traveled, what she ate, what her apartment looked like. I knew her life in a way that felt genuinely strange.

She did not know I existed.

That moment sat with me for a long time. Not because I felt guilty exactly. But because I realized something uncomfortable. I had just spent two hours of my life completely absorbed in someone who had no idea I was there. I had not learned anything. I had not connected with anyone. I had not created anything. I had just consumed a stranger's life like it was a television show.

And the worst part was I did not even enjoy it. I just could not stop.

The visibility trap

Before I get into the algorithm I want to share something that goes much deeper. A theory I have been sitting with for a while now about what social media is actually doing to how we see each other.

I grew up in a hair salon. My mother ran one and from a very young age I watched the publishing industry up close. Publishers would come into the salon regularly to sell magazine space. Pay a certain amount and your business gets a feature. Your face on the page. Your name in print. It looked exactly like editorial coverage. It was advertising.

But here is what I watched happen every single time. When someone found out my mother's salon had been featured in a magazine the reaction was always the same. Genuine awe. She must be so successful. She must be so powerful. How impressive.She had paid for it. But nobody knew that. And the signal, the appearance in print, the visibility itself, was doing all the work regardless of the reality behind it.

I was a child model. I was in the industry from a young age. I watched television work the same way. Someone appears on a show and suddenly people treat them differently. They must be talented. They must be special. The TV said so.

Most people never see behind the curtain. They just receive the signal and assign it meaning.

Algorithmic social media is doing the exact same thing. Just democratizing it.

And this is where my power imbalance theory comes in.

Say you are a lurker. Twenty followers. You find your co-worker on Instagram. She has twelve thousand. Something shifts. You start seeing her differently even if nothing about her has actually changed. The follower count registers as a signal. She must be interesting. She must be doing something right. She must have something you do not.

I experienced this directly. I once knew someone who ran a restaurant. He had nineteen thousand followers. Professionally shot photographs. Well lit. Aesthetically consistent. The feed looked impressive.

And I caught myself thinking he must be talented. He must be really successful. I gave him more benefit of the doubt than I otherwise would have. I let things slide that I would not normally let slide. Because the signal said: this person has value.

When I eventually looked closer, the reality behind the signal was hollow. The talent I had assumed was not there. The success I had imagined was largely constructed. The nineteen thousand followers were doing work that had nothing to do with the actual quality of what he was building.

The visibility had manufactured a perception that the reality could not support.

And I realized this is not unique to him. This is the whole system.

Algorithmic social media has created a world where visibility is mistaken for value at scale. Where a well lit photograph signals competence. Where a follower count signals credibility. Where being watched by many people feels like proof of being worth watching. Just like the magazine. Just like the television appearance. Except now it is available to everyone with a ring light and a consistent posting schedule.

The person with twenty followers watches the person with twelve thousand and feels smaller. Not because anything real has been established. But because the architecture of the platform creates a hierarchy based entirely on visibility. And visibility, as I learned watching publishers sell space in my mother's salon, can be purchased, manufactured, and maintained independent of any actual substance behind it.

This is one of the quietest and most damaging things algorithmic social media does. It does not just make you compare yourself to others. It makes you assign meaning to signals that were never designed to carry meaning in the first place.

Why I left

Before I deleted my accounts I spent a long time feeling like I needed Instagram to succeed. That was the message everywhere. You need a presence. You need followers. You need to show up consistently. You need to build an audience before you can build a business.

So I tried. And what I found was that to get any traction at all I would have to follow trends. Post what the algorithm rewards. Make content that looks like other content that already worked. Chase the format, the sound, the aesthetic of whatever was performing that week.

And I kept thinking: this is not me. None of this is me.

I also noticed something about how I actually used social media when I was on it. I was almost entirely passive. Scrolling but not really reading. Watching but not really seeing. Consuming enormous amounts of content and retaining almost none of it. Not because the content was bad necessarily. But because the format was designed for passive consumption not active engagement. You are not meant to think deeply. You are meant to keep moving.

That passivity bothered me. Because depth is the whole point for me. The whole reason I built what I built. And I was spending hours in a space specifically engineered to prevent depth.

And as someone just starting out, pumping out content only to get one like from your mom is genuinely demoralizing. The algorithm does not care about your work. It cares about your consistency, your format, your willingness to perform. For someone building something genuinely new and complex, something that requires actual context to understand, the algorithmic short form format is almost perfectly wrong.

My work requires depth to land. A fifteen second reel cannot carry it. And I refuse to reduce ten years of thinking to a trending audio clip.

So I left.

What happened after

The silence was uncomfortable at first. Algorithmic social media had quietly become my default state of boredom. Without it I had to actually sit with myself. Which sounds simple but is genuinely harder than it sounds when you have been using a screen to avoid that silence for years.

But then something shifted. I started noticing things again. Thinking in longer stretches. Having ideas that felt like mine rather than reactions to things I had just seen.

I also stopped performing a life I did not have yet. Because that is what algorithmic social media asks of people who are building something. To show up as if it is already done. To post the highlight reel before the highlights actually exist. To manufacture visibility before the substance is ready to support it.

I was not willing to do that.

I made a different choice. I would build slowly, in spaces I own, for people who actually want to go deeper. A website. A blog. A mailing list. Writing that lives longer than forty eight hours. Platforms where the quality of the thinking matters more than the speed of the output. And yes, YouTube and Pinterest, because those platforms reward search and depth rather than virality and performance.

It is slower. It is less visible in the short term. And I have zero regrets.

Because the people I want to reach are not scrolling TikTok looking for a wellness brand. They are looking for something real. And real things do not need a ring light and a posting schedule to justify their existence.

They just need to actually be there.