Thoughts On Quitting Snapchat

The need to constantly stay updated and tuned in to everyone else’s life is taking over modern society and snapchat allows for it to be so easy to just scroll through everyone else’s lives. Being a gal who has studied in separate continents and have made friends from around the world, the need to stay connected with people a couple thousand miles away is real. I wanted my friends back home to see how amazing my life was in California and I wanted my California friends to see how amazing my travels around the world were. People would often see my stories and snapchat me asking where I was or telling me how cool it looked. Staying connected with friends was as easy as scanning someone else’s “snap code”  and adding them to your friends list. A couple minutes later, you can view their story and see what they’ve been up to in the past 24 hours.

I don’t quite remember when exactly I started using snapchat. But I remember that it wasn’t the next big thing yet and stories did not exist when I had started on the platform. Instead, if you wanted everyone to see your snaps, you would have to send it individually to every single person in your friends list. You would have to physically go through your friends list and click on every single name in order for everyone to receive your snap. It wasn’t until later when stories and chat was introduced did snapchat truly grow into the platform that it is now. About the same time was when “streaks” were introduced. A streak is a record of the number of days which you and a snap friend would send snapchats back and forth consecutively and in order to keep your streak and have the number increase, you would have to send daily snaps. I became mesmerized with snapchat and the idea that I could share my daily moments for all my friends all around the world to see. I started many streaks with friends and at the highest point had streaks with nearly 30 different people. Some of which were my closest friends who I spoke to daily and others were merely just acquaintances who had said “we should start a streak!”. At a certain point, I realized what I was doing on social media. I maintained streaks with people I hardly knew and sent generic snapchats to all of those people just to keep my streak with them. Every day the first thing I did in the morning was send a mass snap to all my streak friends and the last thing I did at night was send another mass snap to all my streak friends. This was all to ensure that my snap streaks didn’t die and would still be there when I woke up the next morning. Slowly it became a pattern of gaining streak after streak and letting them grow to the different milestones. We celebrated reaching 100 days with a friend and then maybe even a year. People often defined their relationships with their friends by their streak number and being someone’s number one best friend was important.

That all happened to me. Snapchat became my most used form of social media and I prided myself in the fact that I  was able to maintain my streaks and keep my number one best friend spot with my real life best friend. But it made me think about how it was affecting my relationships with people. I didn’t even text people as much anymore and instead would send a snap in lieu of an actual conversation. My friends and I would spend time looking cute and trying to pose for the perfect “story”. And when I would look through my other friends’ stories and see what they were up to, I found myself envious of their lives. I was jealous that my New York sophisticate friends would often host large parties in their grand homes; I was jealous that my friends back home were meeting new people and traveling the world. I was even jealous of the people I was with and how they had streaks with more people than I did. It was unhealthy for me to be constantly comparing myself with everyone else and comparing my life to theirs. But at the same time, I thought about the stories that I have posted in the past. Those stories were also of my grand adventures and of things that I would try to make look as cool as possible. Taking a photo of my travels was no longer just for me anymore but instead it was to make everyone else wish they were me. It made me mad at myself and upset at the life I was leading yet I still kept it. I kept Snapchat because I wanted to stay in touch. I wanted to be updated as to what my friends were doing and I wanted to be able to reach out to them whenever.

But a week ago, after sending my final snap saying that I was quitting snapchat to all my streak friends. I deleted the app from my home screen. I can’t say that I felt any different having removed the app immediately afterwards but my home screen did look awfully empty. It was missing that little yellow icon that had always been the first thing I gravitated towards. But I was able to do it. And for anyone else contemplating the decision, you can do it too. I spent months thinking about this matter and was too much of a coward to remove the app. The fear of missing out when my friends would say “did you see so and so on so and so’s story?” My final decision at the beginning of summer (ironically when everyone would be posting stories of their travels) came from realizing how much I depended on snapchat to occupy me in moments of awkwardness or when I was uncomfortable. Realizing that I soon will be embarking on a journey without wifi or any of the fundamental aspects of modern society made me see that I didn’t need snapchat in my life. If this is something you want, you can do it too. Sure in the past couple of days there have been moments which I thought “that would make a cool story” or wanted to send a particular picture to a friend that would make them laugh. But overall, I don’t miss waking up to only snapchat notifications knowing that the majority of them were mass snaps sent to a bunch of people. I don’t miss worrying that my streak would disappear because my friend didn’t reply. Most importantly of all, I don’t miss comparing my life to everyone else’s without a good perspective of who they are or where they come from. People might argue that deleting snapchat would drift them away from their friends. But my friends who are thousands of miles away don’t need snapchat to contact me. There are so many other ways of getting in touch that sending a photo with a short caption really isn’t significant. Sure I may never hear from the acquaintances that I had streaks with ever again, but if they were true friends they wouldn’t need snapchat to contact me.

To say that I miss the good old days when writing letters were the primary form of communication would be a lie because technology has made our lives so much easier. I can text someone I went to preschool with and be able to find them without tracking down their address. But consequences arise from this too. This technology driven world has made people so desperate for attention and immediate results. Deleting snapchat may just be a small part of the journey that I’m undertaking and it was important that I do it because I want to find my individual self away from the ideas pushed towards me in every direction through social media. I guess the next step for me is seeing how this plays out and maybe I’ll rid myself of another social media platform. Instagram for me isn’t as toxic as snapchat was because I don’t feel the immediate need to open instagram and check notifications every half hour. Being able to find a balance is the most important of all and for all those people who are able to incorporate snapchat into that balance in their lives, more power to them. Their individual minds are stronger than mine. Deleting snapchat may either be the best or worst decision of my life and I guess we will have to find out.

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