I deleted my social media and expected to feel disconnected but instead I felt connected to my actual life for the first time in a decade

I found out about James through a mutual friend, and I was curious enough to reach out. He’d deleted all his social media at 58—Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, even the LinkedIn most people keep grudgingly for professional reasons—and I wanted to know what that actually felt like from the inside, not as theory but as lived experience. He agreed to coffee, seeming slightly bemused that a younger writer wanted to talk about his decision to disappear from digital space.

“Everyone assumes I’m making some grand statement,” James told me right away, which suggested he’d had to explain this a lot. “Like I’m rejecting technology or making a political choice or something. It’s much more boring than that. I just realized I wasn’t getting anything from it.”

James had been on Facebook since the early days—he was in the demographic that joined when it was still primarily college students and early adopters. He’d watched it grow, evolve, get darker. He’d accumulated 847 friends (he looked up the exact number before deleting), people from his entire life: college roommates, former colleagues, family members, acquaintances from a 1990s music scene, his actual close friends.

“I thought the whole point was connection,” he said, and there was a genuine puzzlement in his voice, like he was still turning this over. “But I’d scroll through and I realized: I’m not connected to these people. I’m performing for them. Or observing them perform. And the ones I actually want to be connected to—I just text them or call them. So what is this?”

That’s when he started noticing the gap between the feeling of connection that social media promised and what he actually experienced using it. He’d post something—a photo, a thought, a joke—and feel a little hit of validation when likes came in. But then what? He couldn’t point to an actual moment of connection that resulted from it.

“I started really tracking it,” James said. “Like, I’d see someone post something and think, ‘oh I should reach out,’ and then I’d... not. Because we were already connected, digitally. Why would I actually text them? I’d done my social duty by liking the post.”

The worst part, he told me, was when he’d see someone post about something significant—a breakup, a job loss, a health issue—and he’d think, ‘I didn’t know about this.’ And then he’d realize: they told thousands of people simultaneously. And he’d been one of thousands. The intimacy of actually being reached out to directly had been replaced by mass-communication pseudointimacy.

“I had this moment,” he said, stirring his coffee, “where I realized I was getting messages from people who I’d lost touch with 20 years ago, telling me happy birthday, people I hadn’t actually spoken to in decades. And that felt worse than not getting birthday wishes at all, because it suggested we still had a relationship when what we actually had was a digital simulation of one.”

So he deleted his accounts. Not dramatically, not with a big announcement post (which would have been ironic). He just went into settings and did it. And then he waited for consequences.

“I thought I’d miss things,” James admitted. “I thought I’d feel disconnected or worry I was missing out. And for like... a week, I did feel that pull. That phantom phone thing. But then it passed.” And here’s the part that’s key to his story: the people he actually wanted to stay connected to reached out directly. By text, by email, by actually picking up the phone.

“I got fewer messages,” he said. “But they were better messages. They were from people who wanted to actually talk to me, not people who wanted to maintain a passive digital connection so they could feel like they had more friends than they actually do.”

Research on social media use and loneliness shows that passive use actually correlates with increased feelings of isolation, particularly in middle-aged and older adults, while direct communication increases genuine connection satisfaction—which maps exactly onto what James experienced.

What’s interesting is what he did with the time. “I read more,” he said. “I actually call people now instead of just liking their posts. I go to concerts—actual concerts, not just following bands. I’m bored sometimes, which I’d forgotten was a thing you could be. And I have real conversations with the small number of people who actually matter to me.”

He mentioned something else too, something about attention. “I notice I’m actually present,” he said. “Like, I’m not simultaneously living and documenting. I’m just living. It’s strange how novel that feels.”

I asked him if he worried about being out of the loop, professionally or culturally. Did he miss out on things that mattered? “I’m 58,” he said with a smile. “I think I’m past the point where memes are going to significantly impact my life. And for actual important information—real news, friend events, job opportunities—people still contact me directly.”

For more on digital wellness and authentic connection, we’ve covered this in our lifestyle section. And this research on social media abstinence and wellbeing outcomes provides interesting context for understanding what happens when people step away.

What strikes me most about James’s choice isn’t that it’s radically countercultural—plenty of people are questioning social media now. It’s that he’s not evangelizing. He’s not trying to convince anyone else. He just made a choice that worked for him and he’s living it quietly.

I think about James sometimes when I’m scrolling through Instagram, maintaining my own digital presence for professional reasons, watching people I went to high school with living parallel lives in feeds. There’s something envious in it, I’ll admit—the simplicity of just opting out entirely. But there’s also something admirable: the clarity of knowing what you need and what you don’t, and having the courage to actually act on that knowledge.

He deleted social media at 58 and didn’t miss a single thing except the illusion that he was connected to people who never actually reached out in real life. And that illusion, he suggested to me, might be the most important thing to lose if you want to find real connection.