Dr. Philip Bender is a practicing psychologist in Manhattan and Poughkeepsie, NY. Writing about modern life and mental health from an existential perspective

Why I'm Not on Social Media

The truth is, no one ever asks me. When I tell someone I’m not on social media, the reply is always some version of “Good for you!” Because we all know it’s not healthy. Some people just can’t imagine life without it.

When I say I’m not on social media, I mean I don’t have a single account or profile. No Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or TikTok. No LinkedIn (the privilege of being in independent practice). I don’t even use Venmo because I don’t like its social “feed.” It wasn’t always this way. I used to have some of these services, but around 2018 I decided to delete them all and be done with it.

Even though I wasn’t the heaviest user, I’ve really noticed the difference. I’m more present in my life and relationships. I feel more in touch with my emotions, more conscious of my choices and more connected with other people. And that matters.

It matters because my time, all of our time, is precious. I want to spend mine living in the here and now and doing things I care about. When I was younger I figured I had all the time in the world, but becoming a parent has quickly changed my perspective. I want and have a responsibility to be present with my kids, and I also want to keep pursuing my interests and passions. And there are only so many hours in the day!

Much has been said on this topic, but it’s still a struggle for so many. I offer some of the personal and professional perspective I’ve gained. And it goes without saying that I can only speak from my own lived experience, as an American adult and therapist for adults. I don’t know how well these observations apply to other cultures, and I don’t have much of a window into the tumultuous effects of social media on adolescents.

We Just Can’t Put It Down

I wouldn’t say I was ever addicted, but through most of the 2010s I posted and scrolled on Facebook as much as the next person. Sometimes I took breaks and then came back to it. Trump’s election in 2016 galvanized me to become more engaged in politics and activism, and social media seemed like the natural place for that. The more time I spent, the more automatic it became to just pull out my phone and start scrolling.

Beyond taking up time, what I read frequently affected my mood. I noticed an increasingly vitriolic tone in the online discourse, even among people who were supposedly on the same “side.” When a particularly toxic flame war erupted in the comments to one of my posts, between people who didn’t even know each other, I decided I’d had enough. I got off to escape the toxicity, and I stayed off to be more present in my life.

Right away I noticed improvements to my attention and focus, so I went even further. I pared down my apps and notifications, making my phone a tool for only essential functions. The final leap was disabling news alerts, another frequent source of stress. Today my phone only buzzes me for calls, texts and voicemails. I have silent, in-phone notifications for email and group chats, and everything else is disabled completely. And I do still read the news, just on my own schedule.

When I tell these stories, most listeners express agreement and talk about their own struggles. Because social media is designed to be addictive. No one bats an eye when we say that. As Jonathan Haidt documents in The Anxious Generation, it was and is completely intentional. (You might already be familiar with some of those facts from the “Facebook Files” leak of 2021.)

Should we be surprised? We live in a society that prizes and rewards extreme wealth and corporate greed at nearly any cost. It seems only natural that our own attention and feelings have become the latest resources to mine. And of course the privacy issues are rampant, another observation no one ever challenges.

Unfortunately, as long as I still use Google Maps to get where I’m going, I participate in that system. But the last thing I want to do is turn my personal life and identity into commodities to be sold in this perverse marketplace. (For a deep dive, read Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. You’ll never want to play Pokémon GO again.)

And I have many tech-addled clients whose focus has become so fragmented that staying present in their lives feels impossible. When I ask how they spend leisure time, I increasingly get the answer “Watching YouTube videos.” I love watching quality TV, but it’s not the same. These algorithmic feeds bombard our attention with endless stimuli, which can become as addictive as a drug. Like any addiction, you go through withdrawal without it. Everyday life loses its luster.

None of this has to mean that technology, or even social media, is some great evil. Even if they were designed with morally questionable intent, these are tools just like any technology. It’s up to us to decide how we use them, and more importantly, how we don’t. But humans need face-to-face interaction. As Haidt puts it, play, spontaneity and embodied experience help us be more present and more emotionally flexible. When our lives only exist in a digital feed, these things are lost to us.

An Epidemic of Alienation

I have many clients who are struggling to build satisfying friendships. Even socially active clients complain about friends being distant or hard to pin down. I see it in my own life too; people are reluctant to commit to anything. Direct communication seems to feel like a burden. Instead of “Let me get back to you,” text messages simply go unanswered. Instead of engaging in conversation, we are drifting in a void.

But again, social media feed comparison creates misconceptions about how common this is. People see pictures of friends smiling at group activities, to which they weren’t invited, and conclude that only they are isolated and unloved. Everyone else must feel deeply connected and content. I can assure you that’s not the case. These feelings are widespread.

Maybe the more we perform our lives, instead of living them, real-world interaction becomes too confusing and overwhelming. Our emotional energy is already drained by reading all those posts and “stories.” As author Freddie deBoer wrote (quoted by Haidt), “The human impulse to see other people was dulled without accessing the reinvigorating power of actual human connection.”

That’s because social media only offers a false sense of connection, the illusion that everyone you know is present all the time. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, this was a boon because in-person engagement had become dangerous. But it went on for so long that face-to-face interaction is like a foreign language now.

This seems particularly evident in how we’ve grown extremely averse to conflict. Good-faith debate has been replaced as a social skill by comments, reactions, and Twitter flame wars. Disagreement feels uncomfortable, even excruciating, and folks would just rather not go there. I see this in my work, particularly in the group therapy setting, which exists precisely for people to build these skills.

And when people do disagree, online, they armor themselves in so much hostility that true conversation is impossible. To respectfully disagree is to be emotionally intimate with another human. When we express our authentic feelings, whether in love, anger, or disappointment, we’re showing a true and vulnerable part of ourselves. But this seems unthinkable to many people in our era and culture.

It falls particularly hard on males, who already struggle with emotional intimacy due to cultural gender norms. This can cause disillusionment and bitterness against women, who those norms position as the arbiters of emotional connection. When my friends and I were lonely teens, we would just put on Elliott Smith and feel sad. Today, young men can scroll through social media feeds and be introduced to the Andrew Tates of the world, who are more than happy to provide them with twisted and dangerous explanations for their loneliness.

In Escape from Freedom, the humanist psychoanalyst Erich Fromm wrote, “Destructiveness is the outcome of unlived life.” If we are to feel fulfilled, we need real human connections and meaningful life experiences. These needs are increasingly being perverted and subverted in the name of big tech profits. Our mental health and happiness suffer as a result.

Let’s Get Existential

Fromm and Rollo May, the foremost existential psychologist, have much wisdom to offer here. They saw many seeds of these challenges in their own times, and their solutions were individual autonomy, meaningful life pursuits, authentic human connection, and self-actualization—a sort of humanistic individualism, if you will.

In Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics, Fromm defines the “marketing” personality type, an outgrowth of our Western capitalist societies. These individuals instinctively tailor their personality to the needs of the marketplace. Because our culture defines the good life as one of financial success, which increasingly requires emotional labor, the individual must make him/her/themself into a salable commodity.

“Success depends largely on how well a person sells himself on the market, how well he gets his personality across, how nice a ‘package’ he is…” I was floored when I read that. He wrote it in 1947, and it reads like a critique of personal branding or social media influencing.

When we do this to ourselves, we lose our humanity. As May wrote in The Meaning of Anxiety, it severs the connections between our labor, creative output, and self-esteem. We get stuck in an endless cycle of striving and insecurity for “wealth as a sign of individual power, a proof of achievement and self-worth.” But there is no such thing as enough. So life just feels empty, as I’ve lately heard from many clients, especially Gen Z and Millennials.

Relationships are turned into commodities as well. Reluctance to commit is what you get when people are always waiting for something “better” to come along. Friendship, as a concept, is losing its meaning; it’s all about perceived value and social capital. And the same has happened to dating, thanks to the apps and their toxic game theory dynamics. Feeling a sense of responsibility toward other people seems downright antiquated.

Social media companies want us to think they’re helping us live better, providing a free space for us to use exciting new tools to enhance our perception and presentation of life. You gain the illusions of value and choice, but you’re actually ceding intimate personal details and control of your emotions and behavior to predatory corporations. That’s not freedom. It’s a recipe for chronic anxiety and unhappiness.

So What Now?

There is so much more to say about all this, including big concerns about the impact of social media on democracy, which I’m not qualified to address. And there’s self-help mental health content on TikTok and YouTube, which has big implications for my field. In all honesty, my abstinence may be hurting my practice, as therapists increasingly use these platforms to make a name for themselves and attract clients. But I want no part of it.

I have several recommendations I offer clients who want to change their relationship to social media, and personal tech more broadly. They all boil down to one idea: live your life mindfully, in the present, with intention. Stay present in your experiences. Be thoughtful with your choices and values. Build real human connections. Put effort into things. Care about something.

Again—our technology are tools, and we decide how we use them. If you’re reevaluating that for yourself, here are some things you can consider.

We must relearn the lessons our children teach us (before their brains get hooked on devices). They play with each other, they move their bodies, they ask to be read to and held. That’s real human experience.

You’ll be rowing against the tide. It’s easy to accept social media companies’ Faustian bargain: just give them your data, your attention, the levers to control your emotions, and in return they’ll give you a constant feed of stimulation, and the illusions of connection and engagement with people who are actually miles away. Are you happy with that deal?

Text and Photograph © 2025 Philip Bender

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