I have only this blog. I don't do all the other BS platforms (Facebook, X, Instagram, etc.) form intellectually indigent and verbally disabled morons who are looking for attention. I've had hundreds of this blog's readers who ask me why I don't have a presence on these social media platforms. I generally answer that I don't need to have every jackass out there giving their opinion on what I think. Which is why I rarely post comments from readers.
I also don't want to be free-funding these giant corporations with my personal information so that they make a buck off of it. To me, having a social media presence is like leaving the door of your house open all the time and allowing anyone and everyone to come in and walk around and pick up stuff. Social media are the biggest violators of privacy that ever existed.
I encourage everyone to bail out and close your social media accounts.
Here is a fantastic analysis of people like me who do not have a social media presence.
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Psychology says people who keep their personal lives off social media often share these 12 beliefs about attention and identity
Julie Brown
Thu, March 12, 2026
I posted a photo of my daughter's birthday party three years ago and spent the next hour checking how many people liked it. I noticed I cared about the number, and that bothered me more than the number itself.
I deleted the post that night. I just looked at it and thought: I don't want this moment to live here. I want it to live in my memory, not in a feed where it gets measured.
That was the beginning of a slow, quiet withdrawal from sharing my personal life online.
Not a big announcement. Not a self-righteous post about leaving social media. Just a gradual pulling back, one unshared moment at a time.
People who stop sharing as much on social media have all arrived at a similar set of beliefs.
1. They believe that what's personal loses something when it becomes public
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The dinner with the friend.
The quiet morning with a partner.
The moment with their child that felt sacred in real time.
They've noticed that the act of documenting and sharing these moments changes the experience of having them—and the change isn't an improvement.
Something about turning a private moment into content flattens it.
The memory gets replaced by the post, and the post becomes the version they remember.
They'd rather keep the original, unfiltered and unwitnessed, even if no one else ever sees it. The privacy is what makes it theirs.
Once they realized that, the urge to share stopped feeling like connection and started feeling like giving something away.
2. They think the comparison game is damaging
According to the American Psychological Association, people who limit their social media presence often report that one of the primary reasons is a desire to avoid the comparison cycle—both the comparisons others make about them and the comparisons they catch themselves making about others.
They post a vacation photo, and someone they haven't spoken to in years uses it to measure their own life against. They share a career milestone, and it triggers something in a friend who's struggling. The sharing creates a feedback loop they didn't intend, and opting out of the loop is easier than managing it.
3. They'd rather have real relationships than share only the good stuff
They want the people in their lives to know them through direct experience—through conversations, shared meals, and actual time spent together—rather than through a curated highlight reel that represents the best angles on their best days.
The people who know them well know them well because they've been in the room. Not because they've been scrolling. And there's a quality to being known that way—through proximity and repetition rather than posts and updates—that can't be replicated digitally.
The people who know them through a screen know a version. The people who know them through time know the person. And they've decided the second kind of knowing is the only one worth investing in.
4. They've realized that posting changes why they do things
Research from Neuroscience News has found that frequent social media users often report a shift in motivation—where experiences that were once pursued for their own sake begin to be filtered through the question of whether they're worth sharing or not, subtly reshaping the reason the experience was sought in the first place.
They catch themselves framing the meal before tasting it.
They notice the thought "this would make a good post" arriving before the thought "I'm enjoying this."
And the moment they see that shift, they pull back—because the experience started belonging to the audience before it belonged to them.
5. They associate privacy with self-respect
Not in a preachy way. In a quiet, personal way.
They've decided that keeping certain parts of their life off-screen is a form of self-care—a way of protecting the things that matter most from being consumed by people who aren't part of them.
Their relationship. Their children. Their grief. Their joy.
These things exist in a space they've deliberately kept separate from public view, and the boundary feels as natural to them as locking the front door. They're not hiding. They're choosing what deserves protection, and they've decided most of the important things do.
6. They don't trust the version of themselves that shows up online
Frontiers in Psychology reports that many people who step back from social media do so after noticing that the version of themselves they project online has started to feel separate from the person they actually are—and the gap between the two becomes uncomfortable.
They're funnier online than they are in person. More confident. More polished. And instead of enjoying the performance, they start to feel uneasy about it—because the person getting the likes isn't quite the person living the life.
Stepping back is a way of closing the gap and staying honest with themselves about who they actually are.
7. They believe that some emotions aren't meant to be witnessed by everyone
The grief that came after a loss.
The pride they felt watching their child do something remarkable.
The love that lives quietly between them and the person they're with.
These feelings are real and enormous, and they believe the feelings deserve more than a caption.
I feel this one deeply. The moments that matter most to me are the ones I'd never post, because the act of sharing them would turn something I felt into a show or a performance. And the feeling was better than any performance could be.
8. They've seen what happens when people build identities around their online presence
They've watched friends curate a version of their life that looks nothing like reality.
They've seen people chase engagement metrics as if the numbers measured something real.
They've noticed the anxiety that follows a post that didn't perform, and the brief high that follows one that did—and the way neither feeling has anything to do with the actual quality of someone's life.
The decision to stay off isn't superiority. It's self-preservation. They saw the cost in other people and decided they couldn't afford it.
9. They value being known by a few over being seen by many
Research from the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin suggests that people who limit their online presence tend to invest more heavily in deep, in-person relationships—and that this investment is often a conscious trade-off, prioritizing quality of connection over breadth of visibility.
They'd rather have five people who know the real version of them than five hundred who know the curated one. The smallness of the circle is the point. It means everyone in it got there by being present, not by scrolling.
10. They don't want to be searchable anymore
There's a specific kind of freedom in being hard to find online.
No old posts to explain. No comment history to defend. No photo archive that follows them into every job interview, first date, or new relationship.
They like the idea that the person meeting them for the first time has to actually meet them—that the impression will be formed in real time, not pre-loaded by whatever someone found on a screen. It isn't evasion—it's an invitation to show up fresh.
11. They've realized that silence online doesn't mean they don't have a life
The people who matter know where they are.
The people who don't know were probably relying on the feed to maintain a connection that wasn't actually there.
The quiet online hasn't made them less present—it's made them more present in the places that count.
They're at the lunch. They're in the room. They just aren't on the screen. And the distinction matters to them more than most people realize—because the people who confuse online silence with absence are often the same people who confuse online presence with connection.
12. They'd rather protect their inner life than protect their image
Most people worry about how they look to the world.
These people worry about how the world gets in.
They've built a boundary not around their reputation but around their experience—keeping the internal landscape intact by limiting who has access to it.
The belief underneath all of this is simple: some things are more valuable when they're not shared. Some joy is richer when it's private. Some love is deeper when it isn't documented. And some version of themselves is more real precisely because no one else has ever seen it.
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