u/Relevant-Golf7886

I can remember the exact moment I realized I was truly free.

I was on a cruise, surrounded by some of the most gorgeous, inspiring, breathtaking scenery I'd ever seen. I was walking the decks, looking around at all the people, when I stopped and thought to myself: Where is everybody?

The chairs were full, the bodies were there, but there was zero presence, it was like walking through the decks of a ghost ship, not a single person had their head up. Tables full of people sitting together, every one of them with a phone in their hand, on Facebook, FaceTime, Instagram, posing for pictures.

I stood there looking at them and thought, Man, you're fucking free.

Six or seven months before that cruise, I was the definition of a social media whore. From the time I was a teenager until my early 30s, I spent an enormous part of my life on it. I lived my life for the post.

Half the time, I wasn't even present for the cool experiences I was having because I was too busy taking a picture of myself to prove to everyone else that I was there.

Then reality hit hard.

I got into a really bad car accident, lost my job, and watched my income start to dwindle.

For the first time in my life, I wasn't the one posting the cool life. I was the one scrolling, watching everyone else live theirs.

Slowly, day by day, I fell into a deep, dark depression. I started thinking, Woe is me. The world is against me. Why don't I have all these nice things?

Everything I saw was starting to hurt me. I'd get pissed off, jealous, depressed, or just generally miserable, and I couldn't figure out why. I didn't connect the dots. I had no idea I was sitting there feeding the fire every single day.

The turning point came in a pretty fucking weird way.

I was starting to pull myself back up and opened a business with some friends. I went onto a local Facebook group to advertise it, and out of nowhere, I got banned and kicked out. When I made a comment about it, people I thought were my friends came out of the woodwork to attack me.

That was the day I said, Fuck this.

I shut down my Facebook.

For the first six weeks, I went through what I can only describe as withdrawal. It felt like quitting cigarettes, maybe not as physically intense, but mentally, every bit of it was there. The itch to check, the phantom pull to scroll, the anxiety that there might be something happening that I was missing.

But slowly, as the days passed, the noise started to quiet down.

I thought about Facebook and Instagram less and less. I stopped wondering what everyone else was doing. I stopped comparing my life to theirs. And gradually, I started to feel something I hadn't genuinely felt in over a decade:

I felt happy.

Why Reddit and YouTube Are Different (in my opinion):

People often ask me how I can use platforms like Reddit or YouTube if I "quit social media."

To me, the distinction is night and day.

Facebook and Instagram were about me. My identity, my appearance, my life, what I was doing, where I was going, what I owned, and how other people perceived me. I was constantly putting a highly curated version of myself on display and then waiting to see how people reacted to it.

Reddit and YouTube aren't really about that for me.

I use YouTube to learn how to fix things, explore weird little hobbies, watch documentaries, and listen to people talk about things I'm interested in. I use Reddit for anonymous, topic-focused communities where nobody knows my face, nobody knows what I drive, where I live, or what kind of life I'm living.

It's information and shared interests, not an arena for personal vanity.

I don't scroll a feed to see how much better someone else's life looks than mine. I use the internet as a tool again, rather than letting it use me as the product.

Looking Back:

Standing on that cruise ship hit me so hard because I wasn't just looking at strangers.

I was looking at my past self.

I was looking at people giving away their present moment so they could curate an illusion for people who probably weren't even thinking about them five minutes later.

And the funny thing is, I used to be one of them.

Now, I'm about to embark on a bucket-list trip, and I get to do it knowing there are four and a half years between that trip and the last time I closed my social media apps.

Four and a half years of actually being there.

Four and a half years of memories that don't need to be posted to be real.

That's what freedom ended up looking like for me.