The Mystic Art of Logging Off

A painting overlooking the Bill Thorpe Walking Bridge in Fredericton, New Brunswick. (Submitted by Tin Belinic)

It was just past midnight. My room was pitch black. The soft glow of my phone was illuminating my face; my eyes felt heavy and tired as I sat with a pillow pressed between my back and the wall. My thumb reached for Instagram, and I started scrolling my way through an endless sea of content, stuck in a whirlwind of post after post. 

A person dying of cancer, a protest clip, a gym transformation, an AI advertisement, and a famous actor on a trip to Italy. Each image disappeared as another took its place, but when I woke up, I remember deciding to make it stop.

I sat on my squeaky black leather office chair, flipped open my laptop and let the tips of my fingers drum on the keyboard as I typed. The mouse cursor hovered over the delete sign of my Instagram account, and I was met with the words, “Are you sure?” I had thought about this for weeks, always telling myself I’d do it sooner than later.

The hesitation was still there.

I click the mouse once, then again to refresh my page. My Instagram account was gone, and my other accounts followed suit. I deleted YouTube from my phone and my ancient Facebook account was gone as well. I shut my laptop, leaned back in my chair, and spun around with my eyes fixed on the ceiling. 

The day went on as normal. The hesitation to check notifications felt almost distant, and like clockwork, the day gave way to the night, and I went to sleep. The next morning, nothing felt dramatically different, which was almost unsettling. I walked to school, sat outside my class, and the world moved the same way it always had. My friends still talked about the same things, classes went on, and a couple of messages from my family and friends back home came through on WhatsApp. But my body still hadn’t processed what happened over the weekend; my body hadn’t caught up yet.

As I was waiting for my class to start, I reached for my phone without thinking about it; my thumb instinctively searched my phone for an app that wasn’t there anymore. Then, I opened my email and scrolled through it slowly, even though I had already read everything. I wasn’t looking for anything particular. I was just looking to emulate the feeling of the scroll to soothe that itch in my brain, and then doubt kicked in, forcing me to confront how much of my time before was spent on social media and my phone wasn’t intentional; it was just convenient to fill the gap of boredom and silence. 

A couple of days later, I received a letter from my grandfather; he wrote that life always moves as a parabola. Being a lifelong student devoted to math and physics, he always linked the terms to daily life, more often than not citing Isaac Newton and how his genius applied to everyday life. I lay sprawled out on my bed, thinking about all those lessons I had learned in my high school physics class all these years ago, and decided to jog my memory by revisiting the definitions of Newton’s laws. It had me start thinking about one of the most famous anecdotes in the history of science: Newton’s discovery of gravity.

Newton was always obsessed with the orbit of the Moon around the Earth, and after witnessing the simple fall of an apple after just sitting alone with his thoughts in his mother’s garden, he decided to spend the next few years of his life working on the math to conjure up the force of gravity. Why did the apple fall downwards? Why not sideways or upwards? 

This simple moment aroused his curiosity, and it began to replay over and over in my own mind like a broken record on repeat, the needle poking and probing my brain, “Would Isaac Newton ever have discovered gravity if he wasn’t bored, just staring at an apple falling in his family’s garden?” 

A week later, I started asking people more about their own habits and thoughts. One afternoon, after working out at the university gym, I walked through campus with my friend Aan Takyar. An Indian student in his last year,

Aan is always smiling and cheerful, his dark face smooth and his brown hair always messy, as if he had just gotten out of bed. Conversations with Aan were one of the main reasons I decided to quit social media, as he himself quit months before I did, attributing his decision to a feeling of burnout and lack of motivation.

We traverse through the icy pavement and climb the porcelain-white steps that lead to the parking lot of the campus. Despite the ice-cold wind clinging to our faces, Aan was, as always, wearing a light outfit consisting of sweatpants and a gray sweater, his backpack swung around one shoulder, and the soles of his sports shoes were worn out. Usually, we say goodbye at the parking lot, as Aan lives two feet from campus in one of the rows of university-owned houses on the outskirts of campus, but before he leaves, I ask him a question that has lingered on my mind about his almost three-month journey of quitting social media: “Do you ever get bored?” 

These simple words started a forty-five-minute talk as we stood there in the vacant parking lot, lost in conversation, our shoulders slumped, and our hands resting in our pockets in a desperate attempt to combat the cold. He stared at the snow beneath his feet as I asked him about social media; he thought it over for a second, then craned his neck up and gave a gentle shrug. 

“There was a constant comparison back and forth that I used to do when using social media; that ended. I’m much happier,” he told me.

A couple of days later, I was finishing a night shift at my student job on campus. I grabbed my jacket off the coat hanger and wrapped myself tightly up to my neck. Locked the office and stepped outside onto the basement halls, where a handful of students were still gathered working on assignments. I stared at a student across the room. He was slouched over his laptop, one hand propping his head up, the other lazily dragging the trackpad of his MacBook. I approached and asked if he would be willing to answer a couple of questions; he said yes as long as he could remain anonymous, letting out a nervous chuckle. 

“I always felt there was this pressure on how many followers you have,” he said, adjusting his glasses, checking his phone for the time before slipping it away in his pocket.

“How many likes you get and who sees your posts and stories, and it sort of affected how I saw people outside of social media, confusing who they are online with who they actually are.”

But first, we need to take a step back and acknowledge how we got here in the first place by stepping into retrospection.

Over twenty years ago, in the early days of emerging Web 2.0 platforms such as YouTube and Facebook, came the innovative feature of the follow button that we all know and love today. At the time, it was groundbreaking; it allowed people to connect with friends and family and build a community with up-and-coming creators around a common interest. The following gave you the power to choose who you wanted to build your little corner of the endless sea of the ever-growing internet. 

But before social media tycoons broke the code on retaining engagement and attention, back in the ancient internet days of big computers, loud keyboards, and loud CPU fans, websites had natural page breaks. Websites were designed to let you decide whether to stop or keep going as you reach the end of the page. There was no infinity scroll loop to keep you sucked in and mindlessly flicking through your phone.  

No, that came in 2006, when website and interface designer Aza Raskin, and later co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, created the infinite scroll, thus removing natural stopping points from websites; the infinite scroll removed that brief pause or moment of hesitation; it removed the users’ need to decide whether to stop. It effectively created an endless rabbit hole.

By founding the Center for Humane Technology with computer scientists Tristan Harris and Randima Fernando, the trio had created a nonprofit organization focused on creating countermeasures to the design choices of social media sites and digital platforms that were deteriorating the user’s ability to focus and impacting their real-life relationships and mental health. As of now, their main mission is to raise awareness in an ever-changing technological landscape and bring about a shift in focus toward more humane technology; that is, to have it be used for the people, not against them. 

In an interview with Joe Rogan in 2024, which also featured CHT co-founder Tristan Harris, Aza Raskin admitted that he regrets making the infinity scroll: “I was blind on how it was going to be picked up and used not for people, but against people.” 

When a feature works on one platform, it doesn’t stay there for long, so when TikTok utilized the concept of the feed, cutting out showing you who you follow and instead, based off your search, like, and viewing history, building you a custom feed from scratch based off the content the algorithm predicted you would engage with for long periods of time, other platforms followed.

Other platforms ditched the concept of the follow by copying and pasting algorithmic predictions into their services. Our phones, in many ways, have become pocket-sized slot machines. It’s one thing to go to the casino, but it’s another thing to bring it into bed with you.  

Ever since I went AWOL from social media, I began to notice why my generation is chronically burnt out. It’s because we are always performing. There is this unsung belief that if we aren’t online, if we aren’t sharing every facet of our daily lives and constantly chasing results, then we are falling behind. But I also noticed that just because it seems that you are doing a lot doesn’t mean you are getting a lot done.

This feeling isn’t accidental; it is built into the platforms we use themselves. Our ability to reflect has been stripped away; we are the first generation expected to always be reachable in the day, to always be online. The pain we’re feeling is that we will pay a lot of attention to things that aren’t important to us, that don’t bring us any meaning or joy. 

Recently, Canada and several English-speaking countries have seen a decrease in the happiness index compared to over ten years ago, with a report from The World Happiness Report for 2026, published by the Wellbeing Research Centre at the University of Oxford, stating that the negative correlation between mental health and social media use is strongest in teenage girls. The report attributes the main area of concern that leads to mental health struggles to the algorithmic feeds and social media influencers themselves, as they promote negative social comparison. The report highlights that no English-speaking country was in the top 10 according to the happiness index. This does not come as a surprise; Meta itself admitted during the 2025 FTC trial that only 7% of time on Instagram was spent viewing content from friends.

However, more people have begun to notice the shift in the lack of social interactions. There is a small but growing movement of young people venting their frustrations and quitting their favourite platforms. Meta and YouTube have been in hot water themselves recently with the heavy media coverage following the case of the anonymous woman from California, only known as K.G.M., who has filed a lawsuit against the companies. The jury ruled that the companies must pay her 6 million dollars in financial damages. But her case is one of thousands being filed across the United States, and the consequences for the industry could be detrimental in bringing about new laws.  

Even before this breakthrough, there have been numerous researchers/writers, such as Jonathan Haidt and Michael Harris, who have been sounding the alarm for a long time. The power of social media platforms, such as Meta, TikTok, and YouTube, is revealed in that we keep turning to them even though we know they harm us, and the emptiness of them is exposed when we leave them behind, and nothing happens.

A growing number of countries around the world are following in the footsteps of Australia, which was the first to ban social media platforms for young people under the age of 16. Countries such as France, Austria, Spain, Denmark, Brazil, Malaysia, and many others are planning to implement laws that will ban young people below specific age groups from accessing social media this year, with France being the first European country to follow Australia, as the French Senate has voted to ban social media for teens under 15. Change is undoubtedly on its way. 

A few days ago, I found myself sitting outside my house with nothing to do; the rain had washed away all the snow, and the early signs of spring were showing. Birds chirped, and their song filled the streets. The lively bushes rustled. A woman jogged with her golden retriever. A father walked with his daughter; her shirt caught in the zipper of her little light pink windbreaker.

My phone nestled away in my pocket, no notifications waiting for me, no reason to reach inside and fish it out. At first, I shifted around, glancing at the warm trees and the squirrels marching through the wet grass. My mind reached for something to latch onto, the way it used to reach for a screen. But the urge softened. I noticed the sound of the wind moving through the trees before me, the way shadows shifted on the ground, and the way one thought led quietly into another when nothing interrupted it. I stayed sitting there longer than I expected.

This serene moment, where I was tucked away in the warm embrace of springs, reminded me of the story of Isaac Newton sitting beneath an apple tree in his mother’s garden, watching as a single apple fell, and I began to realize what he must have felt in that moment, to recognize the kind of attention that allows something ordinary to become meaningful. Whether this story was fabricated or not by both Newton and the generations that came after him doesn’t matter. In a world ruled by a lack of attention and technology, the power and impact of his story have only grown stronger with each time it’s told. It’s a reminder to all of us. 

Would Newton ever have noticed the apple and discovered gravity if he had been refreshing a feed? Would any of us? Meaning doesn’t come from constant input; it comes when all that input stops. When there is only a comfortable stillness. 

Sitting there, with nothing pulling at my attention, I realized how rare that kind of moment had become and how necessary it is. My mind drifts away, and I imagine seeing a beautiful painting; people crowd and clutter around it, trying to get a better view. I take a step or two back and watch from a distance. Perspective comes from taking a step back, and where your attention goes, your life will follow.