Some months ago, I would spend hours on TikTok scrolling away, allowing the app to stimulate all of the emotions, feelings, and thoughts I neglected because of my passive lifestyle. The app told me what was relevant and important, which sides to take, what points to argue, what’s pretty and petty, what’s wrong and right, where to travel and who to avoid, what outfits to wear and which books to read, which artists to listen to and what’s for dinner, and how my dream life should be. Each video succeeded in bribing me to watch the next. 

TikTok sold me an identity that I tried in vain to fit myself into. I denied the parts of myself where no manual or script existed to tell me how to live, I over-emphasised other parts that the media deemed dignified and fruitful, and I wrote off everything else in between as irrelevant until some one or some thing told me otherwise. 

Awkwardly lumped into the “Dark Academia” aesthetic, my distress rose anytime I felt myself stray from its standards, thus leading me back into the online world to learn more about myself through its filter. I knew more about “Dark Academia” than my own character. I knew what a “Dark Academic” aspired towards, was excited about, and fearful of, but what could I truly say of myself? I spent hours on social media everyday becoming hyper aware of all that was and was not a part of my ill-fitting aesthetic, and obsessed with finding the reality where I could fully indulge in my fantastical dream of studying philosophy and literature surrounded by floor-to-ceiling wood-paneled bookshelves in a medieval gothic-styled european castle in a perpetually gloomy and overcast valley overrun with overgrowth with myself dressed in dark-toned preppy attire drinking nothing but black coffee and red wine with candles burning incessantly all around all while saying to hell with everything and everyone else. 

My obsession with actualizing this dream took over my mind, and the longer I spent on social media, the less tolerable I became of regular day-to-day life. If a task wasn’t directly helping my chances of living my “Dark Academic” dream, I didn’t care to try. If a topic didn’t relate to “Dark Academia,” I would never validate its relevance. If a conversation wasn’t explicitly about philosophy or classic literature, I didn’t care to speak or elaborate. 

I was misunderstood by the world, too intelligent for my own good, too sensitive against society, oh woe was me! 

This existential crisis of the spirit drove me all around social media in search of some remedy, and the common cure I learned from numerous sources was to detach myself from social media for a period of time, meet myself where I was at, and to spend time alone, free of influence, to relearn who I was and what I wanted in life. 

Time has a beautiful way of magnifying faults, and with 4-6 hours of each day now empty, this period of voluntary and intentional solitude helped to reveal the truth that I had over-indulged in an over-abundance of distracting pleasantries. I had to admit to myself that it felt good to be a part of an aesthetic, no matter how off-base, because my choices and decisions were planned out for me. It gave my life a new script to follow now that I’d graduated and left the university lifestyle behind with all of its guidance and direction I’d learned to take refuge in. 

So in four months, I’ve reduced my time spent on social media from upwards of 6 hours a day to less than one, and I now see it with new eyes. Social media preys on insecurity as we pray for clarity, and it’s easy to become engulfed in its world. With more and more people trapped in states of agitated isolation, the abstract and decontextualized becomes a haven to these restless souls. When you have nothing but time, you either learn to embrace and live with it or you run away and hide from it through every diversion possible. 

We run from the present to take refuge in fantasy for nowhere in the world does there exist the reality in which we are as comfortably undisturbed, maximally swaddled, or as wholly validated as in the world of social media. 

It’s easy to believe that a job or relationship or lack of finances is the sole issue for dissatisfaction in one’s current state, but sometimes it’s us who are ill-fitted within a certain lifestyle as I was within “Dark Academia,” and that mismatch will appear as frustration, apathy, despair, envy, hatred, and rejection against nearly everything else. And if the root of these feelings are never addressed, and you continue to use social media to mask discontentedness, those feelings turn towards the next subject…yourself. You become hypercritical and will do anything to boost your ego, to accentuate your strengths, and to hide your weaknesses. But you can’t outrun yourself for too long. “Romantic heroes [travel] to exotic places in search of themselves, only to discover that it was themselves they were trying to escape” (Patrick McGuinness).

Now when I hear and watch the media, there seem to be minimal intersections and discussions of differing opinions and more overlayings of subjective facts and truths superimposed atop one another with each side doing its best to silence and snuff the other’s fire. I imagine at this rate, the chance of compromise and mutuality between people, places, or events will lessen as hyper-criticality heightens indifference towards another’s beliefs and perspectives, irresponsibility with actions done despite those beliefs and perspectives, and insensibility to any emotions that are not identical and simultaneous to their own.

But social media is not going anywhere anytime soon, and everyday I’m sure each platform gets hundreds of new accounts. And I personally haven’t deleted them off of my phone despite writing this blog against frequent use because, as a reformed social media user, I still believe that social media can be used for good. 

We keep life alive through regular intervals of intake and release, and how this translates into the social media realm is through positive exchanges of creativity. We create by craft and craft from creation, life is nuanced, and nothing is exactly as it seems. 

Social media is not reality. Social media is social media, and when we allow it to be exactly what it is rather than a launching pad into prolonged fantasies and ideals, we retain our dignity.

So remain the master of your own mind by preventing social media to tell you who you are, keep a hold of your own emotions by detoxing your nervous system of artificial stimulation, and submit to the flow of life all around you because you’ll never be able to control it forever. 

Step out of your systematized reality where everything exists and acts for the sake of perfection, because if something can only be achieved via unrealistically perfect means, is that something healthy? Absence of a presence does not indicate the presence of absence. Those discomforts will reappear in other, obscure ways. Responsibilities always have a way of catching up to us no matter how hard we try to run from them. A sterile, distilled, and still environment is not life. It’s a kind of death where sense, impulse, and motion cease in sacrifice for prolonged dreamscapes, for there’s very little else more insulting to a dream than reality.