By skyforbes 
I don’t post on social media. I just watch.
TikTok, reels, strangers dancing, strangers crying, strangers doing nothing.
Hours vanish. I barely remember what I saw — only that it was too much.
Sometimes I open Instagram just to feel like I’m part of someone’s life.
But they’re all lying in there. All that curated happiness.
And I’m no better. I’m not fabricating a perfect life — but I’m still consuming the lie.
Social media has become a kind of proof of existence.
Did you really go anywhere if you didn’t post about it?
Then one day, without planning to, I deleted TikTok.
My fingers hovered, hesitating — like I was saying goodbye to a friend.
Or maybe to the part of me that couldn’t be alone with my own thoughts.
And the silence that followed?
It was loud. Deafening.
No voices, no music, no glitchy captions telling me what to feel.
Just me. In a room.
And it hit me — I hadn’t been bored in years.
I hadn’t let my mind wander without swiping it away.
I thought it would feel peaceful.
It didn’t. It was itchy. Like a phantom limb — the scroll that wasn’t there.
But underneath that restlessness, something shifted.
I started hearing things I hadn’t in a while:
The creak of a quiet house.
The sound of my own breathing.
The strange elasticity of time when you’re not trying to kill it.
I didn’t delete everything. I didn’t become a monk with an alarm clock and a flip phone.
But I did learn this:
You don’t have to post to be consumed.
Sometimes, just watching is enough to lose yourself.
And sometimes, stepping away is the only way to find out if you’re still in there.