Why people are choosing to quit social media | BBC Ideas

I'm not sure whether other people on the ship would be happy but I look at other people more I like to observe have a look at what someone's wearing you know imagine what sort of person there'd be just try and live in the moment a bit more that's right no Facebook no Twitter no Instagram no whatsapp [Music] what triggered it was a breakup I think when something like that happens you need to just let someone die social media death and just remove them from your life and then I realized that actually they were not useful

to me anyway so I just went the whole hog and didn't bother using the member again the point about social media is the addictiveness nobody really wants to spend hours and hours every day updating their status and seeing what other people think about them nobody consciously wants to do that but those behaviors are themselves addictive behaviors what you're trapped in that loop it's very hard to break out it's not that we want to go back to some until ik past and Eden before the machines existed it's that we need to take control of these machines

and use them for their proper ends the bad thing is that you think people's lives is much more fun than your own life when I'm the boss I just see people like like zombies and I'm like right there is a Sun it's a sunny day there is no there is something to see that's only your phone you know I like to be present when I share something about myself with someone so I can get their feedback and either stop right there or tell them the story behind it or give context sometimes I might withhold a

certain opinion kind of rapid-fire because maybe maybe it requires a bit of nuance and maybe the best thing is not for me to just shoot my mouth off online because some headline made me angry the thing is the world is real whether we want to believe it or not and it's really important for us to have a sense of where we are in that world I don't like to use the term social media at the end of the day because it implies that it's designed to promote social behaviors when usually it's designed to promote the

amount of attention that we're giving it in order to grab our attention because there's so much competition design has to appeal to the lower parts of us to the kind of non-rational automatic impulsive parts of us and so this is why we get things like clickbait like sensationalism things that appeal to our outrage and there's a whole industry of consultants of psychologists who are are helping designers really punch the right buttons in our brains so that we we do keep coming back for more and we do stay hooked on the products you know the end

of the day their advertising system is not really social platforms [Music] some of them take social media breaks quite a lot anyway so it's not like I'm doing something that's particularly divergent but they think it's a good thing I think they realize we all realized that we look at memes too much we use Instagram too much it's just whether we realize that and do something about it there are things that give us you know instant pleasure and they're like the more gluttonous things like food and sex and stuff like that and they give us a

really high spike of pleasure but the things that are the most worthwhile and the things that you spend a lot of time on so playing the piano is not pleasant to begin with but you gap I can much more steady wave of satisfaction so it does matter because the pleasures that are sometimes the most time-consuming or the ones that take the most work can be the ones that are the most fulfilling those are their pleasures that are self actualizing that help you realize a part of yourself you didn't have [Applause] I'm on it probably every

day just to be nosy and sure I could live without him we did before didn't we