Why I Quit Social Media

I have a 19-year-old daughter and she has deleted her social media apps and now she and her friends are sort of done with it. I'm quitting social media in 2026. I've quit social media for good. TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, done. Social media has become less social. You can't reach your friends and you're just competing with all of this remote abstracted garbage out there. The single greatest biomarker in the world may be attention. In 2025, about half of Americans reduced their social media use because they were experiencing a lack of focus, boredom, and fatigue. I decided to just delete social media for a whole week and kind of just see what happens. There's a sense of clarity that you get when you take a step away from the compulsive checking. Limiting social media use led to reports of people improving their sleep, mood, and overall well-being. Since quitting, I've learned to fill time with more productive things. It honestly made me feel young again. If you stop scrolling, time goes slower. I don't know how, but it does. To test this myself, I decided to do a 7-day social media fast because I wanted to observe its effects on my mental and physical health. By the end of the week, I uncovered something that triggered one of the single biggest lifestyle changes I've ever made. It had been sitting right under my nose this entire time. Slowly killing me for years. Get out of the way! Social media, love it, hate it, despise it. It's the heartbeat of the world. Yeah, it's not starting. Can you put the bullet? It's complicated. It's a teeny bit beautiful, mostly ugly, but there's probably like a exception where you find a piece of content like a Bryan Johnson piece of content, you're like, that, that was good. You guys, I am on your team. Like, I feel good about that. But 99% of the time, I think it's our modern-day pollution. And so I became a heavy social media user because it was the way we communicated with the world. 3, 2, 1, action. Hell if I know. I'm not Antonio. I'm Bryan Johnson. We're trying to be useful in that person's life, but then also the medium I I choose to build this project is the medium that creates the corrosive damage I endure. I think it's getting to a point where I should test the waters on where am I at with my mental health relative to my social media usage. I've collected over 1.5 billion data points on my body, and so what we find is When we do a given thing, we see ripple effects throughout the entire body. So what happens when you stop doing social media? We thought it'd be a really nice rubber band experiment of like, you take off the pressure, where does it go? Like a fast, you can't just nibble on food and snack on food. You have to turn it off. Otherwise, one, it's not a fast if you're eating some food, but two is it's too hard to do something in moderation. And also, if you're trying to achieve the benefits, there's a certain amount of time you need to be away from something. And so it's not like you fast fast from social media for 5 minutes and you feel the effects. It's got to be a certain length of time for the body to decompress itself, otherwise I may not even feel its absence. I made 2 rules. One, all social media banned, nothing was acceptable. And then number 2 was the things I could do would be audiobooks and podcasts. So long-form conversations where I could put my headphones in and then as I work out or doing various activities, I could settle into a deep conversation or a Fuck. Okay, let's give it a go. We can try it. Day 1 was like awkward in the first few minutes of like, what do we want to do? You're like, where do we go? Neither one of us had ever been released from duty. Walk right through here, launch the raft. Easy. Should we go get pad? Yeah. Probably could have settled for like a 3-person. This feels like a 9-person, doesn't it? When the waves crash, we've got to go fast and we've got to— we have to like basically— okay. It was very much a kid-like experience of unstructured open play with no expectation from the world. By day 7, I never wanted to be on social media again. It was like, you know, you see it for all its toxicity. I noticed more things around me. I noticed more of my own thoughts. I was aware of my own emotions. It just reminds you of like how you've become blind to so many essential things in life. As I got more space, around me. Things that were right in front of my face that I was oblivious to became apparent. And I think the most jarring one was that I finally could see I had toxic turf in my backyard. I'm not sure if it was exactly the fast, but it happened in a very similar time frame. So I have to wonder, did the fast allow me to see and take stock of some obvious things I just was missing because it consumed so much of my attention? I've spent millions of dollars trying to not die, and this whole time I've had toxic turf in my backyard. There is no easy answer with social media. It's legitimately a necessity for people to feel like they're part of a community. But if somebody watches me, I don't want to be a negative presence in their life. So if it's positive, great. If it's negative, turn me off. We're going to make this a non-toxic space and document the whole thing. I'm hoping the grass is greener on the other side and not made of tires. Social media has cornered us to say, if we don't engage, we're not part of the tribe. That's not true. You too do not need to be in this punishing position. It is safe for your nervous system to disengage, and you can be more alive and not be run by the algorithm.