Disconnected: The Harsh Reality Of Opposing A Social Media Dominated World

Last updated: Thursday, September 5, 2024

First published: Monday, September 18, 2023

Written by: Geoffrey Kong - Founder and Lead Technical Writer

Brief Summary/TLDR - 4 mins

A story about the impact that refusing to use social media has had on my life.

The story begins in middle school, where I found out about the negative side of social media platforms (data collection and selling, privacy erosion, misinformation), and managed to save myself from them by largely refusing to use them or heavily restricting my usage once I found out. My classmates were less than pleased with this, because I wasn’t “normal”, and gradually, I began to be left out of group chats, hangouts, and events.

This trend continued in high school, where in the rigorous IB program I was a part of, a combination of aggressively competitive personalities and stubborn crowd mentality against anyone who didn’t use social media made it largely impossible for me to make any friends, despite my best efforts, because I wasn’t willing to be “normal” and join Instagram like everyone else. This led to a four year long period of social isolation and exclusion at school, and when COVID arrived in 2020, physical isolation was added as well. The climax of these events was a state of having given up throughout most of grade 11 over everything I'd experienced in high school on a social level, as well as the heavy workload from IB.

I began recovering at the start of grade 12 (and basically fully recovered by the end of it), and combined with leaving the IB program, I managed to pull myself together to get good enough marks and got accepted to a computer science program at one of the big name universities in my country. Although, socially, things didn't really improve in grade 12, since that stubborn crowd mentality against people who refuse to use social media was still present there. The only things I was looking forward to was graduation, and starting university, since it meant that I wouldn’t have to deal with the suffering I endured even just being anywhere near my high school anymore, and that there would be a social “reset” so that I could start fresh.

My university life is infinitely better than my high school life. I have quite a few friends, and I’m in a bunch of clubs that align with my interests. Unlike back in high school, people at my university are not just outright dismissive of people who don’t use social media. I still face some social issues with being left out and being out of the know because contacting me still isn’t easier than before, but now that contacting people myself is actually possible since people aren’t outright dismissive of me, I’m able to be more proactive. Despite that, I still can’t help but wish that people would invite me to more things, and I also can’t help but feel years behind everyone else socially on account of my lost high school years when I walk by and see large friend groups and couples around my university.

And if you’re someone who went to my high school in my year, I would like you to know that this article is not an attack on you personally, and this is just my perspective on what I experienced. I’m sure you have many objections to the claims I make, but you can’t change what I witnessed. I just hope that just like my horrible high school experience made me grow as a person, the knowledge that you were a participant in that, willing or not, will prevent you from treating other people that way in the future.

While I can’t win the battle to save society at large from falling deeper into the clutches of social media, I can and have at least won the battle to save myself. And despite all the pain I’ve endured in pursuit of this principle, I’ve achieved a lot of things that seem like dreams to many people today, be it a long attention span, or the ability to concentrate on a task for hours on end, or freedom from the pitfalls of using social media, or even near complete phone independence. I’ve paid quite the price for these benefits, but they’re by no means insignificant, and despite the battle against social media at large being a losing battle, I’ll still continue to fight on, not only for myself, but to raise awareness to the hidden isolation and exclusion those platforms can create, and to keep the great dream of a world where people like myself aren’t treated as mere afterthoughts alive and well.

Prologue: Motivations, venting, and a difficult answer to a burning question - 2 mins

Just a quick disclaimer before we get started. I don’t wish to slander anyone in particular with this article, and I’ve just given a vague description of any and all groups and people involved in this story. Even if you happen to know me personally, or you just happen to know what people or institutions I’m referring to, please do not harm or harass them in any way. This is solely an opinion piece, based on my own experiences, and is not a call to action for or against any of the actions I’ve taken or that I’m discussing here.

I’ve wanted to tell this story for a few years now. My only regret is that it took me this long to write down all of these often quite painful memories that I’ve been holding in for all these years.

This isn’t the typical type of article that you’ll be seeing on this site. This article is much less flashy, fun enthusiast takes on the latest trends and news in tech, and more personal, touching, and heartbreaking compared to any of the other articles on this blog. At best, this topic is only tangentially related to consumer tech enthusiasm because it’s about social media platforms. But, I still think this topic is worth talking about here. And despite how much I hate to admit it, social media companies like Meta, Snap, and ByteDance are amongst the world’s most powerful organizations, and hold a great deal of influence on our lives, both positive and negative, though for me, it’s mostly negative.

The story that you’re about to read is not a happy one; it’s full of pain, suffering, and loneliness. I just hope that by the end of the story, you’ll understand exactly why I hold the opinions and ideas that I do about social media, my high school and the experience I had there, and even my hometown. Perhaps you’ll even come to understand why I feel quite lonely sometimes, even to this day. I also hope that you’ll gain some insight into me as a person, and to a hidden story that so few are able to tell.

A lot of people have been surprised that I don’t use social media over the years, and quite understandably, they’ve asked me why I don’t, because it’s “so unnatural” in today’s society. But I don’t think I’ve been able to give a single person who’s asked that question an answer that I’m remotely satisfied with yet, simply because the story’s too long and complicated to explain in just a few short sentences. Regardless of whether or not you’re one of those people, I hope that this article imparts you with a satisfactory answer.

Chapter 1: The only one who dared to oppose the rise of social media - 4 mins

The story really begins with my origins as an enthusiast. It’s late 2016, and it’s the golden age (in my opinion) of smartphone modding. Jailbreaking, rooting, and phone modding tutorials here, the death of the Nexus and the birth of the Pixel there, Apple removing the headphone jack, and even finishing with a bit of a firework surprise from Samsung. Truly takes you back to the good old days, doesn’t it?

It was just the right time to jump into the world of consumer electronics enthusiasm, but while I was still finding my bearings in it, a curious thing was happening amongst my classmates in middle-school. Almost all of them were signing up for Facebook accounts. And things just kept escalating from there, from posting content, to creating group chats, to DMs. In the blink of an eye, everything was happening on Facebook. And surely you remember your middle school days right? Peer pressure is much more effective on you the younger you are, and that was certainly the case for me, and I essentially got forced to create a Facebook account to interact with everyone in my class.

And if I was “normal”, the story would probably end there. 99.9% of people never give a second thought to the reason why they started using social media; for most people, it’s just been a constant part of their life for as long as they can remember. And in another life, maybe that might have happened to me too, but in a way, I’m glad that it didn’t.

I’d happened upon some less than savoury articles about social media networks at the time, mainly about the Facebook data leaks. Those articles led me down a rabbit hole where I discovered the real truth about social media platforms: they aggregate and sell your personal data, and they gradually yet eventually, completely erode your privacy by having a permanent and constant real-time record of everything you do both on and offline.

I was certainly not pleased with what I had just found, and I tried warning my classmates about the potential dangers of continuing to use these platforms. But, as you might expect for a middle school crowd, someone like me, who wasn’t exactly popular and that people had started describing as a computer nerd, wasn’t exactly going to get much attention, and my warnings were completely dismissed by the majority, and even by my friends, all of whom continued on as if everything was alright.

But, I couldn’t just continue on as if literally nothing had happened. If I couldn’t convince anyone else, I’d settle for the second best thing; saving myself. I drastically cut my Facebook usage to basically only messaging my few close friends, and switched to sending people friend requests only when I needed to talk to them extensively. That last point basically made it so that I only had my closest friends as Facebook friends.

However, none of that was without quite a severe price to pay. Turns out, surprise surprise, that you can’t just cut yourself off from the main “chat” platform that literally everybody uses and expect zero social consequences to come from that. It was around halfway through the final year of middle school at this point, and I’d noticed from talking to my close friends that nearly everyone in my grade had created a group chat for homework help and to plan events. Naturally, I wasn’t invited because word about controversial opinions, such as, oh, I don’t know, the fact that you really don’t like the platform that everyone depends on for posts and chatting, travels fast in small, tight knit circles, especially in middle school. Not being part of the group chat obviously meant that I was basically always out of the know of what my classmates were doing, and I was hardly invited to group events other than ones my close friends had. At the time, I didn’t really care too much about it. After all, I still had my close friends to hang out with. On top of everything, I still had a great feeling that I was protecting myself online far more than my peers. Compared to all of the benefits I was getting, I was willing to pay that price in order to keep them. I thought that the exclusion would just be a temporary thing in a few months until I start high school! As maybe a lot of people thought in their middle school days, I thought: “High school is gonna be the time of my life!”

…I honestly don’t know whether to laugh, cry, cringe, or outright collapse when I read those words these days. How I ever uttered that statement in the past seems completely foreign to me now.

But, if I could say something to my grade 8 self, I’d say:

“Do you really think that the social exclusion you’ve experienced in middle school isn’t that bad? Well, you’d better buckle up… ‘Cause if you think that’s the worst of it… you ain't seen nothing yet…”

Chapter 2: A uncomfortable place, a new reality, and a social media platform to rule them all - 11 mins

At the time of my middle school graduation, I had high hopes for an exciting high school experience. Why did I have those high hopes? Well, I'd been accepted into the highly rigorous and prestigious International Baccalaureate (IB) program at one of the highest ranked public high schools in my province.

With that kind of clout, maybe you’d forgive me for thinking I’d have a good experience in the beginning, huh? All the smartest kids from around the many big cities in my region, all in the same place? Surely there’s great potential here! My parents were certainly on board; in fact, they’d even sold our old house near my middle school and moved closer to my new high school.

Just one small problem. No one, not even my closest friends, from my middle school was going to be attending the same high school as I was. They’d all chosen to go to a much-less prestigious, but closer high school in the same neighbourhood as my middle school. Wanna guess what the cherry on top of all of this was? Now that my parents had sold our house in that neighbourhood, it was nearly impossible for me to even see my old friends because they were so far away.

Sure, we talked and played games with each other online, but it just never felt the same again since we lacked that in-person element of interaction. And, spoiler alert, but things only got worse as the four years of high school went on. Thinking back on it now, effectively “losing” my friends from middle school was the first time I’d ever felt truly lonely. But hey, surely I’ll make some new friends in high school… right?

The actual beginning of my high school experience was not unlike what I imagine most people’s to be like. Flashy new environment, new rules, new responsibilities, and new work to do. Seems like an amazing place right? Well, there’s a honeymoon effect for everything. Once it wears off, you can start seeing something for what it really is.

I’m not going to mince my words. I quickly came to despise my high school’s social atmosphere, especially around my fellow classmates in the IB program.

For one, it felt like everyone around me was way too aggressively competitive in almost everything. Even in things that had no business being super competitive. I felt like almost every other person I met was in at least five different leadership roles in clubs, on top of being in three advanced math tutoring classes, and learning two foreign languages. Comparatively, I didn't really do any extracurriculars back then since I just enjoyed having a bunch of free time that I could spend on whatever I wanted, but I couldn't help but feel that a lot of my classmates looked down on me for that. In a lot of ways, they seemed to subtly hint that what they were doing outside of school was supposedly the only valid option for "people of our standing", referring to both my high school's high ranking and the fact that I was in the IB program. Needless to say, I didn't take that well, and that kind of aggressive competitiveness formed a rift between me and a lot of my classmates really early on, before grade 9 had even been halfway done. Initially, I’d thought that that rift was just something in my own head; that I was just too socially awkward to interact with people, or that I hadn’t talked to the right people yet. In some ways, that was true, but upcoming interactions would soon make me realize that in one major way, the rift was much wider than I had anticipated.

As you might expect from the title of this chapter, and to my occasional annoyance even to this day, social media networks refuse to die as a delicate issue I have to deal with. In general, it’s a slippery slope of balancing my personal dislike and independence from them with everyone else’s adoration and dependence on them. So, what do you think the hottest new trend at my high school is in grade 9? Creating. Instagram. Accounts.

Absolutely everyone was quickly jumping on the Instagram bandwagon. And you know how the story goes at this point; posts turn to DMs turn to group chats, and suddenly, wow, would you look at that, everything’s on Instagram now! What fantastic consolidation! It sure would be a shame if for whatever reason, there was someone out there who refused to use Instagram out of principle… right?

“Surely people who don’t use social media don’t actually exist right?”

“You’ll only ever read about them in articles or see them in YouTube videos, you’ll never meet one of those people in real life!”

“How can you even survive without Instagram? Anyone who does is practically committing social suicide!”

“No social media? You’re shady! Surely you’ve got something to hide!”

…No one’s actually said any of these quotes to me directly, but indirectly, pretty much every time I told someone back in high school that I didn’t use Instagram, Snapchat, or basically anything popular with the majority that they had, I couldn’t help but feel like they were indirectly saying all four of those lines when I told them that I didn’t use any of them. At all. Their response? Saying “Oh” and just leaving me alone because I was “impossible to contact”. This honestly shocked me quite a bit. Sure, I’d been left out of a bunch of hangouts and events my classmates were hosting in middle school for not being willing to use Facebook the same way as everyone else, but this was the first time that people were just outright hostile to the fact that I wasn’t willing to join Instagram and be “normal”. It wasn’t long before I realized this was the reason why no one really wanted to associate themselves with me, because they feared “the majority’s wrath”, so to speak.

These were the upcoming events I mentioned back when I first described the social rift, and as you might expect from reactions like that, I quickly realized the rift was quite a lot wider than just differences over aggressive academic competitiveness or how we chose to spend our free time. To me, the bigger problem that caused the divide turned out a deep disagreement over the role that social media would play in high school life between my strong opposition to it on one side, and the majority throwing their full support behind increased social media use on the other. But even I have to admit this was a losing battle. One person, no matter how influential, can never fight back against the majority’s will and expect to win, and I certainly wasn’t anywhere close to being influential, in fact, I was quite the opposite. Over time, I experienced the same sort of social exclusion imposed by the majority just like back in middle school, because once again, I wasn’t willing to “jump on the bandwagon”, so to speak.

It didn’t take long for problems to start arising. The exclusion was a lot worse than in middle school, since I didn’t have any friends at my high school. And as you might expect for someone who was for all intents and purposes, disconnected from mostly everyone, I was basically completely out of the know, and was never invited to practically anything. With none of my close friends going to my high school, on top of the fairly heavy exclusion, I was also almost really isolated. The result? I ended up being alone most of the time, no matter where I went.

I noticed something. There seemed to be a fundamental constant in the minds of everyone at my high school; the desire to reject people who feel like outcasts to them, and people who don’t conform to what the majority view as acceptable. And, for a crowd of high-schoolers, using platforms like Instagram and Snapchat was the majority’s most widely accepted norm. If you didn’t comply and immediately start to use those platforms, the majority just threw you aside like you were worthless trash. They perpetuated a kind of aggressive “we know best" mentality, and their sheer disregard and non-acceptance of people who even dared to deviate even slightly from their norms was what I really disliked about the social environment at my high school. In order to “fit in” and “be normal”, you had to join those platforms, which I obviously didn’t want to do, since I didn’t like those platforms nor did I like the companies behind them. As for where that mentality came from, your guess is as good as mine. Even after four long and painful years at my high school, I never even came close to figuring it out. I suppose it’s just something that’ll remain one of life’s great mysteries.

And as you might imagine, I was absolutely opposed to joining Instagram. I was well aware at the time that it was made by the same company I had tried escaping from a few years before. Except now, misinformation from the herd mentality caused by social media networks started to creep into the tech news, which only made me harden my stance against them. It was bad enough that a monopoly over personal communication was being created, but what outraged me most of all was the fact that the company that had control over this monopoly was one that I heavily disliked, and that I had absolutely zero trust in.

But after what I’d just experienced, what scared me most about the monopoly was how I felt that these companies were using their platforms and their users as weapons against those who opposed them. The message they sent was clear: “Use our platforms and tell us absolutely everything about yourself so we can sell it for money. If you dare leave or speak out against us, you’ll feel the wrath of social punishment, embarrassment, isolation, and exclusion coming at you from all directions from absolutely everyone you know. You wouldn’t want that to happen to you ...right?”.

This, to me, is truly appalling. These companies, in broad daylight, are using their monopolistic influence over your friends, family, and loved ones, to indirectly, but nonetheless, actively discriminate against you if you just happen to be someone who “dares” not to use their services. I don’t see this as being fundamentally any different from the racist and sexist societal norms that once existed all throughout the world in the 19th and early 20th century that we see as unacceptable today. But, if we condemn that kind of discrimination, and even make it against the law, then why shouldn’t this be unacceptable too? This is why I never even considered just being “normal” by making social media usage a part of my life just like everyone else. Aside from being a complete privacy loss, the only thing that would do is allow these companies to win, and just continue repressing their opponents, people like myself, even more than they already are. And when I had this thought for the first time, it made me realize the true and terrifying power of tech monopolies have over our lives, and it's deeply unsettling, particularly when you're an opponent of some of them.

Regardless, at the time, feeling increasingly isolated and excluded, there was sadly very little I could do. The cold hard truth was that on top of it being very difficult to coordinate everyone you know to switch chat apps, it's practically impossible to incite major change when you’re seen as a social outcast. The only thing I could do was try and harden myself, and try to press on regardless.

And it sorta worked. I survived socially and prevented myself from completely breaking down by talking to my friends from middle school over the weekends, and by playing games with them when we had time. Meanwhile, schoolwork took over the remainder of my time, and honestly, it was the only thing that kept me distracted enough from my problems because addressing them was essentially impossible with neither the majority nor myself being willing to compromise on our respective beliefs.

Oh well, I haven’t exactly had a great first two years in high school, and I felt like literally everyone was against me, but surely I’ve hit rock bottom by now… right? There’s nowhere further down for me to fall, so the only way is up now! Surely nothing catastrophic will happen like oh, I don’t know, a massive global pandemic ...right?

…I… really wish I could tell you that was the truth… but I think you know things are about to get worse when I say that by now. I’d advise you to check your calendar, because it’s 2020, and if you know anything about 2020, you know exactly what major global event I’m about to start talking about.

Chapter 3: A global pandemic, a perfect storm, and a downward spiral - 8 mins

The pandemic couldn’t have come at a worse time, and it was quite the perfect storm of factors that made me lose hope.

In the meantime though, it’s the beginning of my third year in high school. And this year would have two big twists. The first one was that the content in the IB program was now exponentially harder, which I was not thrilled about. When the COVID outbreak first started, it was only halfway through grade 10, and the subsequent transition to online learning made the entirety of my second semester courses a blur, which was terrible since the new content was supposed to build on that while also being very difficult in and of itself. Not remembering the foundational content from last year just made everything worse.

The second big twist was the hard-hitting provincial lockdown and stay-at-home orders to contain the spread of COVID-19. On top of all the social problems I was experiencing before the pandemic hit, physical isolation was also stacked on top of the tower of social issues I was facing at my high school, and online school certainly wasn't helping with that whatsoever.

The first is that they doubled down hard on group projects to “make everyone feel less lonely” during the pandemic. I hated doing group projects so much back then, for one simple reason: they just served as a constant reminder of just how much I was cut off from everyone else. More often than not, my group members would just leave me out of the discussion because they couldn’t even be bothered with trying to contact me, and the school board just would not relent with making teachers create group projects for every single class we had. No matter what the class was, there kept being an endless amount of group projects, and in each one, I'd have to deal with that feeling of being left out, with very little I could do, if anything at all, to fight back against it. One person, never mind an outcast, fighting back against the majority is 100% guaranteed to lose. And getting the school board to change their minds about their "group work" directive? You'd honestly have a better chance of winning the lottery.

But the second issue is what really broke me. My school board, in its infinite wisdom, decided to use the worst possible system for online learning. Unlike more sensible school boards, who chose to use asynchronous learning systems, why don’t you try and guess what I got? If you guessed waking up bright and early at 8:00 AM, congratulations, you’re a winner! Remember how at the beginning of this chapter, I told you that the content I was learning in school was exponentially harder? You might be asking: “Well, it’s still just high school content, how much harder could it be?” Try the kind of difficulty that makes your schoolwork take upwards of twelve hours a day to complete, while still getting more than half of the answers wrong! On top of that insane workload, how about we try dialing things up to 11? You will get absolutely zero support from your classmates, figure it out yourself! Oh, and don’t forget now, you’ve got a hundred page reading to do for math, plus sixty homework questions, plus a two thousand word essay and a ten minute presentation for English. By the way, all of that is due tomorrow morning, bright and early at 8:00 AM by the way, so you should have started like two hours ago!

That led me to get massively discouraged from doing anything related to school, which led me to procrastinate and do anything other than school. And because I had almost no time left in the day from doing schoolwork, this procrastination took place at night, typically after midnight. As you might expect, this led to me developing a terrible sleep cycle and not sleeping at all at night, which led to me either just not attending or sleeping through my early morning classes. That led to lower grades and little to no comprehension of the content I was learning, and that would, finally, lead to me spending all day working on problems related to the new content, and the cycle would repeat itself. The cycle repeated itself enough times over the first few months of my third year in high school that it completely destroyed whatever remained of my will to do anything related to school.

And that was the final straw. I pretty much just completely gave up. I just could not bring myself to care, at all, about basically anything. The only thing I wanted to do was just sleep in, and lacking that, just staying in my bed all day. And when I did attend online class? The only thing I managed to do was anger my teachers for either falling asleep during their classes, being completely absent when asked a question, or just finding excuses to skip so I could do literally anything else. Honestly, after everything I’d been through in those three years in high school, could you blame me for wanting just a tiny little bit of relief? But the truth was, I just wanted to run away from my problems. But this state I’d found myself in wouldn’t last for long, in fact, the upcoming year would bring in some massive changes to my status quo.

…You may think that things are about to get worse for me again, and I honestly wouldn’t blame you for thinking that. People shunned by the majority with far less tragic backstories than mine have had far worse outcomes than just breaking down emotionally and losing hope. But, on the bright side, there’s nowhere further down to sink from here. I mentioned in the prologue that this story isn’t a happy one, and that’s still true, relative to a “normal high school experience” at least. But this story isn’t completely without its bright sides, and despite being in a fairly bad state by the end of my third year, my final year in high school would be by far my best one, if for no other reason than that I’d finally be graduating from high school in that year. And you know what they say: once you’ve hit rock bottom, the only way forward is up.

Chapter 4: A spark of hope, small redemptions, and the start of a new beginning - 6 mins

Miraculously, I did actually manage to pass grade 11, although for a lot of my courses… barely so. The demotivation really didn’t help with that; I really didn’t put much effort into the content, and constantly annoyed my teachers with my lack of effort after all.

I was 100% sure about one thing though. I was going to drop out of the IB program for my final year. I may not have been paying much attention in any of my classes, but the one thing I remembered clear as day was how my teachers only mentioned how compared to the hell on Earth I experienced in grade 11, grade 12 was supposedly five times worse. There was no way I was signing myself up for that. Oh, and the fact that I would’ve had an IB-specific five-thousand word essay (Extended Essay or EE) due literally the next day that I hadn’t even written a single word for if I stayed in IB wasn’t helping the case for staying in the program. And that was that. I’d decisively be in the non-IB “Academic” program come the beginning of my final year.

Well, I might have said that I didn’t want to write my five-thousand word EE, and here I am, writing an eight-thousand (ish) word long article about my high school experience. The irony of that certainly isn’t lost on me, but I digress.

Having the huge weight of IB off my shoulders now though, I could finally start thinking somewhat positively again, and it didn't take long for my thoughts to turn to what I’d be doing after high school, since graduation was coming up so soon after all. Despite being both mentally and emotionally destroyed at the end of grade 11, I was still keeping up with the tech news. Aside from attempting to bridge my problem with well, everything in my life at this point, by talking to my friends from middle school online (which didn’t go so great since they were busy with their own commitments and new friends at this point), my interest and excitement for the latest in consumer tech was the only thing keeping me from absolute insanity. But I was really passionate and knowledgeable about tech, and I still am, and long story short, that really motivated me into thinking about going to university and studying computer science, so I could work in the tech industry.

Socially though, leaving IB didn’t really help the social situation, and it just added on top of it, though not significantly so. As is so common with people at my high school, people were still not accepting at all of you if you refused to use social media, and even less so when you’re an “outsider” who “came down from on high” from the IB program who’s been absent from their circles for the vast majority of high school life. But, after three years of dealing with this mentality, at that point, I couldn’t have cared less about what people at my high school thought of me anymore; I just wanted to be finished so I could leave that place for good and never come back.

Looking back on late grade 11 and early grade 12, I don’t clearly remember what caused me to break out of the demotivation I'd found myself in. But if I had to guess, a combination of the massive weight of rigorous IB content being lifted off my shoulders, and a new goal to follow, that of trying to get into the best universities I could in order to pursue computer science, likely did the trick. Neither of these things really ended up solving the issues I was facing, they were more of a distraction, really, but for once, it was a positive, rather than a negative change. It was a very small, but bright spark of hope, and I let it guide me.

And guide me it did. Thanks to the much easier difficulty of non-IB courses, I was able to steamroll through most of my new courses and get 90s in everything. Well, everything except for math courses, which were much harder since I basically had to relearn the prerequisites and learn new content at the same time. It’s not like the downward spiral had no effect on me at all, you know. Although, as much as I ended up disliking the IB program in the end, they did inflate my grades for a bunch of grade 12 courses I took in grade 11, which did help my admission average a bit.

And the result of all that? Despite all the pain I’d been subjected to over the course of my time in high school, I’d still managed to rack myself up a grade 12 top six average of 92% and gotten myself a place in computer science at one of the big name universities in my country. Not bad for someone who had been doing pretty poorly less than a year ago, huh?

The best two events of that year were yet to come though. As you can imagine, I was thrilled for the last day of school and my graduation ceremony. Thinking of that day, I felt such a wave of relief washing over me after knowing that I would never have to return to my high school and suffer any more pain there ever again. And after everything I’d been through, that was such a freeing thought.

The second event was bigger though. The university I’d been admitted to was a good distance away from my “hometown”. I say that in quotations because while I may happen to live there when I go “home” to visit my parents, I in no way consider it my true hometown after everything that happened during the high school years. There are a lot of bad memories that I don’t wish to revisit, both within my parents’ house and the surrounding neighbourhood to make me want to stay around there when I do return. And functionally, that’s why, when I do go back, I tend to spend most of my time with my friends in my childhood hometown, far away from where I happen to actually be living. These days, I strongly identify myself much more with my childhood hometown as my true one, and increasingly, the city where my university is located has become a close contender for second place.

But the real thing I was looking forward to in university was the chance to start afresh socially, without the constraints and most of the people from my high school. That brief spark of hope didn’t turn out to be all that brief after all, and for once, after a very long near half decade filled with too much pain, things were finally turning around for the better again.

Epilogue: The present, the status quo, and the future - 10 mins

So, how did I do socially in university? Well, it really depends on how you look at it. Compared to life in high school? Couldn’t be better! My life now is without exaggeration, a hundred times better now, and I’m way more happy today than I ever was, even on my best days while I was there. Compared to most people who didn’t effectively just lose four years of their social life though? …I’m still quite a ways behind. I never got to learn or take part in the traditional high school social hallmarks of making new friend groups and getting introduced to how to approach relationships. I suppose I can’t really help but feel a little jealous when I see friend groups and couples walking around on campus, as I'm feeling in a lot of ways that I’m still socially years and years behind where they are today.

Regardless, compared to my past self, I made quite a lot of progress in my first year at university, I was on great terms with my roommates and met a lot of interesting people through them and around my dorm, and I also joined a bunch of clubs and met really cool people who liked doing some of my hobbies like origami and Rubik’s cube speedsolving. Things were, and they still are, really looking up!

But the cherry on top of everything? The fact that people at my university aren’t dismissive whatsoever of the fact that I refuse to use social media platforms. In fact, people here largely see it as a very positive thing, and will even commend you for it.

I was understandably quite shocked by this. After all, I'd just come out of years of suffering from people who were extremely unaccepting of the fact that I refused to jump onto the bandwagon. To this day, I’m still not sure why people are so accepting about this here compared to the strong rejection of my choice back in high school. Could it be that people are just so addicted to social media these days that someone who doesn’t use it is seen as having overcome their addiction? Is it really seen as having such strong willpower, determination, and the drive to stop procrastinating and reach their goals faster that interests people as a symbol for what they could be? Is it genuine curiosity about a lifestyle choice that seems so foreign and different in society today? Or could the world just have changed to be more accepting of those kinds of differences in the near half decade since?

I don’t know the answer to any of these questions, though I would disagree with the question involving "overcoming their addiction", since it's impossible to get addicted to something if you don't even use it. Regardless, I’m certainly curious about the truth behind this phenomenon. But, in my mind, I still think that there must be an explanation for this happening; to me, there’s no possible way things could have just flipped from being aggressively hostile to well received, especially for a social trend, in just a few short years.

That being said, there aren’t still a shortage of social issues that arise from continuing to refuse to use social media, even here. Being left out of things and also being out of the know is still the number one problem I have, but unlike back in high school, I’m actually able to be proactive about this by asking people about what their plans are, and asking if they want to join me, or if I can join them. Turns out it’s actually quite nice when people aren’t just downright dismissive of you for a simple choice you make, huh?

Still, I’ve got a long way to go with that. Despite all the progress I’ve made, I still don’t feel like I’m an essential member of any of the networks of friends that I’ve found myself being a part of over the past year, nor am I particularly good at talking to strangers and meeting new people just yet. Neither do I think that I’m particularly good at forming or joining friend groups. I just feel like I’ve missed out on way too many of the things they’ve been doing in the past, and despite mostly being numb of FOMO at this point, it still hits me at times, especially when I’ve found myself not invited to hang out or when I miss an event. Maybe I’ve still yet to meet the right people, and that might be true, but I don’t think that I’m being a little too selfish when I say that I wish that the people I know would include me in their plans or ask me to hang out with them and their friends a little more often than they do. All of these remaining issues just make me feel a little lonely and not cared about at times, but these issues should go away with further integration and practice. Still, I still can’t help feeling like I’m still as lonely as I was back then when I get left out of things. Perhaps I should remind myself more about how fortunate and grateful I am for what I have now a lot more often, especially compared to how things were and how I felt back then.

And obviously, I can’t close out this article without addressing an obvious elephant in the room that I’ve been avoiding for all four chapters. That is, the matter of if you’re reading this as someone who was one of my former classmates or as someone who went to my high school. So, if you’re one of those people, let me speak to you directly now.

Let me be clear about something. Like I mentioned in the prologue, this article is not an attack on you personally, or your actions or inactions during those four years. I’m simply telling the story of my high school experience from my memory, as I remember it.

Even so, I’m sure you’d challenge many things in this story, from the way I described the social atmosphere there, the vibe given off by people both in and outside the IB program, your perception of the majority and its will, and perhaps even that you yourself weren’t that unaccepting of people who didn’t use social media.

I won’t mince my words. My position is that I honestly couldn’t care less about what the “truth” in your eyes is; you can’t deny, refute, or downplay what I experienced while I was there. I saw what I saw, felt what I felt, and experienced what I experienced. I’m sorry for shattering whatever conceptions you might have had about your perfect little high-school world, but for my own sake, I needed to get the truth as I saw it, out there. There aren't many of you who go to my university, and even fewer in the same program as I am, and for many of you, I may never see you in person ever again, but my wish is that by telling you what happened from my perspective, you might be able to understand exactly what kind of pain you contributed to, knowingly or not. I just hope the knowledge that you were a participant, willing or not, in the pain I suffered, like those four torturous years I endured, will serve as a catalyst for you to improve yourself. And don't apologize to me for the harm you’ve caused, knowingly or not. If you’re remorseful about what I experienced, then as long as you can avoid treating people like that in the future, that’s enough for me.

And as for my opposition to social media use in society at large that's lasted nearly seven years at this point? As much as I hate to admit it, fighting it has long been a lost cause. Society has completely fallen to social media platforms, and the small handful of individuals who hold out won’t be able to do anything to convince the majority to change their minds. My greatest fear for the future is that the knowledge about the dangers of social media: the data-selling, the privacy erosion, the misinformation, the very real and present danger of social media addiction, and yes, the exclusion and isolation it creates, will be lost. The conversations I’ve had with people at my university have only made me more and more concerned about how normalized social media addiction has become these days. With the pool of individuals who continue to fight the battle for their own independence from social media shrinking, I fear that soon, there’ll be no one left to pass their message onto people who are joining social media today, either out of pressure or by choice, and to future generations who have yet to make their decisions on this matter. And considering how the reach of social media has only expanded in the past few years with the rise of TikTok and BeReal, and Meta’s aggressive expansion into Twitter’s domain, all of these problems are only compounding themselves, and I can’t help but fear what the future holds for social media holdouts like myself. After all, the social media companies and big tech monopolies have absolutely no interest to do anything in the best interests of holdouts like myself. But while the greater fight against social media use in society at large has mostly been lost, the chance to win the battle for your own freedom from social media is still very much a winnable battle. There aren’t many things that I can say with certainty, but I can say with certainty that I’ve decisively won the battle for my own personal independence from social media. I can at least be proud of myself when I say that I’ve legitimately reached a level of both smartphone and social media independence that a lot of people can only dream of reaching.

The future certainly won’t be easy, but then again, neither has the past. Socially, I still feel like there’s still such a long road ahead of me to get to where I feel like everyone else is today. But, without the aid of social media, the only path forwards is a trial by fire in my social skills. Despite all the pain, inconveniences, and missed opportunities that refusing to use social media has brought me, and continues to bring me to this day, I’ve still managed to achieve a lot, whether that’s phone independence, a long attention span, the ability to concentrate on a single task for hours and hours on end, and freedom from the shackles of all the pitfalls of using social media that so many people seem to be dealing with, all of which seem like wild dreams to a lot of people in the modern day. To outside observers, the benefits may not seem worth it compared to everything I’ve had to deal with in exchange. But the truth is that they’re the basis of a lot of the qualities I have today, and regardless of the reasons or the causes, it's a part of my life experiences now. Even though I know full well that the fight against social media in society at large is mostly a lost cause, I'll still continue to push on, both for myself, and everyone else who may be just like me, if for no other reason than to raise awareness of the hidden isolation and exclusion those platforms can create, and to keep the great dream of a world where people like myself aren't treated as mere afterthoughts alive and well.

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