The Year We All Stopped Trying to Be Liked
Sometime between March and July 2025, something broke.
Not the internet. Not the economy. Not even Twitter.
We did.
Silently, without a manifesto or a viral hashtag, millions of people looked at their glowing rectangles, felt the familiar tug of dopamine, and simply… let go.
They didn’t rage-quit. They didn’t announce a “digital detox.” They just stopped performing.
The Day the Algorithm Noticed
On June 14, 2025, Instagram’s internal metrics team saw something they had never seen before:
Average daily active users dropped by 9.4 million in a single 24-hour period — and nobody was posting “goodbye” stories.
No drama. No “taking a break” carousels. No sunset quotes.
Just silence.
By August, the drop was 41 million. By November, over 120 million accounts had gone dormant for more than 90 days — the longest sustained decline in social media history.
Researchers called it “The Quiet Quitting of the Self.” We just called it Tuesday.
The Four Things That Finally Broke Us
- The Comparison Collapse
We saw the same friend get engaged, promoted, pregnant, and move to Bali in the space of 11 perfectly filtered stories. Then we opened our banking app. - The AI Mirror
When Midjourney started spitting out perfect versions of our faces with better bone structure and dreamier vacations, we realized even our real photos were now competing with deepfakes of ourselves. - The Burnout of Being Perceived
One 28-year-old software engineer in Seattle told me: “I calculated I spent 11.5 hours a week just thinking about how I would be perceived. That’s more than I spent with my girlfriend.” - The Day the Group Chat Died
The final straw? When someone left a 7-year-strong WhatsApp group with the message “I love you all, but I can’t do this anymore” — and nobody fought to keep them.
What We Did Instead
We didn’t go off-grid. We went under-grid.
- We made new Instagram accounts with zero followers and posted nothing.
- We turned off read receipts and never explained why.
- We started meeting friends without taking a single photo.
- We took up hobbies that produced zero content: pottery, film photography, bread baking, long-distance running at 5 a.m.
- We read entire books in one sitting and told no one.
We became the most boring people on the internet — and the happiest we’d been in a decade.
The New Status Symbols of 2025
Forget the Hermès bag. The real flex now is:
- An iPhone homescreen with zero red notification badges.
- A Spotify Wrapped that says “1,842 minutes” instead of 148,000.
- Being impossible to tag in photos because you simply weren’t there.
- A friend saying, “Wait… you’re on Instagram? I never see you.”
The Science That Proved We Were Right
Oxford published a study in September 2025 tracking 8,000 people who reduced social media use by 85% or more.
Results after 6 months:
- Clinical anxiety: down 41%
- Sleep quality: up 39%
- Real-life friendships (weekly in-person contact): up 67%
- Reported life satisfaction: highest increase since records began
One line from the conclusion became a tattoo on half a million arms:
“The less you are watched, the more you can live.”
The Night I Deleted 11 Years
I kept one archive. 11 years. 9,842 photos. 1.2 million likes.
I opened it at 2:13 a.m., scrolled for exactly 7 minutes, and felt… nothing.
No nostalgia. No pride. Just the hollow realization that I had spent a decade curating a museum no one would ever visit.
I clicked “Permanently Delete.” The progress bar took 43 seconds.
When it finished, I went outside and sat on the curb.
A stranger walked past and asked if I was okay.
I smiled — a real one, not the one I’d practiced in mirrors — and said:
“For the first time in years, yeah. I really am.”
He nodded, kept walking.
I never even got his name.
And that was perfect.
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