Blog / 2025 / Quitting Social Media: Pros and Cons for Artists

It’s five years to the day since I deleted Instagram and Facebook, and I finally feel ready to do an anti-product review, which is to say a pros and cons list for avoiding social media.

But first! A bit of history: before deleting my profiles, I was on those platforms nearly every day, and it’s not hyperbole to say they made me the artist I am.

For one thing, they allowed me to find an audience for my work and make a living selling paintings without relying on the traditional gallery path. For another, they supercharged my interest in making art that’s about communication as opposed to self-expression by giving me access to much more feedback about my art than creatives have had in the past.

But in the twelve years I was on Facebook and the five I spent on Instagram, those platforms were rewired to make ever more massive amounts of money for Meta off of all our data. By 2020, the company’s greed had destroyed much of the good of these platforms, so I left.

Pros of ditching Instagram and the like

Acres of time unfurling in every direction.

It isn’t just that you stop spending what I call “oops hours” scrolling, though regaining all that time does feel amazing. The true reward of quitting social media is that time returns to being a landscape, like it was in childhood. Minutes become both a vast vista and a more intimate space where I fall into my focus in a new way, delighting in details.

Hello, Creativity, how I missed you!

Artists who are still on IG, TikTok, and YouTube probably think they’re plenty creative, and they’d be offended by anyone implying otherwise. But, when you’re being fed art along with real-time ratings of that work on a daily basis, you can’t help but be influenced by the stuff that gets the most “likes.” Without those stats polluting my process, my artistic decision-making feels more true to me—though I know I can never be completely free of the pathways that social media carved in my brain.

No more turning your every thought and moment into an “elevator pitch” version of itself.

Social media is like that person in your life who only ever half-listens to you, constantly undermining your confidence by making you feel like you’re not worthy of their full attention. When you’re talking with people like that, you learn to be succinct in order to get your message through, and eventually you forget how interesting you actually are. I love feeling more certain than ever of the value of my work.

Relishing my role as an audience of one.

Four months after I quit, this was the thing that surprised me most, and it still does. I think that, by keeping up with friends via Facebook where they’re posting news for many people at the same time, we forget what it feels like when a person makes an effort to tell us something individually. It truly is magical.

I can see clearly now the pain is gone.

Well, actually it’s the opposite of gone. Since I’m no longer invested in being part of the YouTokBook universe, it’s easier for me to accept that harm is what those platforms do best. Yes, you can still find community on Instagram, and I’m not dismissing the importance of that. But, when I was still using these platforms, I found myself excusing the way Meta et al were murdering our teenagers’ already fragile self-esteem, goosing the loneliness epidemic, and coaxing individuals down rabbit holes of misinformation. I’m relieved to have some distance from all that.

Cons of quitting Facebook and the rest

All your FOMOs come true.

Socially, it’s unavoidable: when you quit InstaTikTube, you will miss out. Professionally, it’s less so. A year after deleting Zuckerberg’s various companies from my life, I wrote a whole article about how to get art opportunities when you’re an antisocial-median. The takeaway is that, when you stop the diffused and often algorithmically-thwarted version of marketing that you do on Insta, you start doing all the other things you know you should be doing to effectively get your art out there.

Speaking of marketing, it certainly is difficult.

The one time in the last five years that I almost regretted quitting Facebook was when running this Kickstarter. Obviously, it all worked out, but the crowdfunding campaign was a real nailbiter.

I’m not the socially dead, but I play one on TV.

When you’re not on Instagram, you don’t exist for some people. They may have a vague idea of who you are, but, without the regular reminders in their feed, it’s hard to make a lasting impression. I feel this especially acutely in my immediate community of Lambertville, where I’ve lived since 2022 and where I recently overheard a neighbor talking about me to someone else: “I guess they’re an artist...?” Contrast that with Surf City, the last town I lived in, where I was on social media from the moment I arrived in 2016 and where people I’d never met IRL would greet me warmly on the street, telling me how much they loved my art videos.

Seemingly beyond judgment, but in a bad way.

As it turns out, the one thing I miss most after five years is that strangers can’t vet me through my social media profiles. It’s such a weird feeling I wrote a post about it a couple weeks ago.

If I had to reduce the list down to a soundbite, I’d say that quitting means more time and fewer connections. It’s not exactly a groundbreaking conclusion, but I think it’s important to emphasize, because:

And these big sculptures in the shape of number ones prove it! They’re part of a public art project that I probably wouldn’t have gotten if I was on Instagram, distracted by all the so-called marketing I was doing there.

Instead, I got this opportunity after keeping in touch with Mural Arts Philadelphia over the course of several years and preparing a version of this project proposal to send to them last summer. They didn’t decide to partner with me for that series, but my work was on their mind when they were looking for #1 artists.