I couldn’t see anything. I stumbled around, trying to find the wall of the cave. After walking aimlessly, I began to hear a distant noise — murmuring mixed with the sound of soft tapping. Intrigued, I began making my way toward the sounds. When I arrived at the origin, I found myself staring at a row of teenagers all facing a cave wall — just as the prisoners in Plato’s timeless story, “The Allegory of the Cave.”
However, unlike Plato’s cave, this wall was dimly lit up, not by a flickering campfire but by a light emitted from something in their hands. As I got closer, I realized their attention was fixated on rectangular devices — their phones. A mesmerizing glow was reflected in their eyes. Everywhere I looked, I saw the glow. They kept their eyes glued to their phones, and before I knew it, I was reaching for mine, seamlessly blending into their self-absorbed world.
—
My family and I were on my sixth-grade spring break vacation, and I found myself seated next to my older brother in the hotel room, each of us intently focused on our phones. He was playing video games, and I rapidly tapped away on Instagram. Tap. Accept follow. Tap. Unfollow. Tap. Follow.
“Daniel, I have more followers than you on Instagram now,” I chimed. “Ok, and why does that matter,” my brother said in a monotone voice, not looking up from his phone.
“Just letting you know,” I said, giggling.
It had been just a few weeks since I’d convinced my parents to get me a phone. My pitch? It was simple: everyone had one and was on social media. Once I had my phone, I aimed to amass as many followers as possible on Instagram. So, I would follow people I didn’t even know, hoping they would follow me back. It became a sort of ritual where, constantly throughout the day, I would follow a bunch of people, and every time I received a notification, I would snatch my phone to see who followed me back. This vacation was no different. I constantly checked my phone, and even during meal times, I would barely look up.
On the last day of our vacation, my family and I were at a nice restaurant, and I was, of course, checking how many likes and comments I got on my Instagram post. However, I wasn’t alone in being on my phone, for my brother and mother were addicted as well. Only my dad wasn’t, and he all looked at us quizzically.
“Is it phone time right now?” he said.
My brother and I didn’t glance up, muttering a dismissive ‘whatever.’ I especially felt irritated since my dad said the same thing every dinner.
“Why are we on our phones? We’re at dinner.”
“Dad, the food’s not even out; there’s nothing else to do,” I retorted. “Oo, Daniel, look at how many likes I got in only ten minutes.” I flashed my screen to him, excitedly pointing at the twenty likes.
My brother just rolled his eyes, and my dad sighed defeatedly.
It was to become a persistent habit — ignoring my parents to chase my social media likes.
It was seventh grade, and I just finished sending my daily Snapchat streaks (sending a picture to another every day develops a streak). I sighed and scrolled through the stories of my peers. There they were, hanging out. I'd assumed we'd be doing that together, but apparently not. I scrolled through a few more stories and saw other kids at my school were also together. I felt a creeping loneliness settling in. I closed Snapchat and opened TikTok to distract myself. However, I was trying to ignore the thought: why wasn’t I invited? I knew I needed to step it up, to put in more effort somehow, but I also wondered if something was wrong with me. Yet, when I got a large flow of Snapchat notifications, mostly from people I didn’t know, I felt relevant, popular, and well-liked.
A few months later, COVID hit, and my dependency and the time I spent on social media became higher than ever.
"Why didn’t she like my post? Does she not like me?" I found myself mumbling, confined to the claustrophobic walls of my room. Coping with the pandemic created a challenge, making genuine conversations over social media platforms like Snapchat difficult. Despite the difficulties, I persisted, determined to maintain connections and not lose relevancy. Yet, the absence of face-to-face conversations strengthened my overthinking, causing me to read too much into every interaction I had on social media. Thoughts like 'They don’t like me because they don’t respond to my Snap' or 'They don’t like me because they didn’t comment on my post' kept arising the more time I spent on social media. Then the unthinkable happened.
—
"Mom, you don't get it," I pleaded. "Without my phone, I'll lose all my friends. At least let me find someone to take care of my streaks!"
Perched on her bed, my mom peered at me through her dollar-store glasses. "No! You didn’t charge your phone last night until 10:30. We warned you multiple times,” my mom
replied in rapid Korean. This was a sure sign she was angry when she abandoned English for her native language. Her temper was flaring, for this wasn’t the first time we’d had this discussion.
I sighed, frustration evident on my face. “I don’t know any kids that have to charge their phones in their parents' room, let alone at 10 p.m. I’m almost in high school!” I emphasized the ‘high’ to signal my maturity (I was still only in seventh grade).
"Well," my dad chimed in from the side, "one of the professors I'm friends with took his daughter's phone for six months, and she said that was ‘the best thing that's ever happened to her,’ so maybe we should do that instead."
I really loathed it when these random parents influenced my dad. That's why he constantly pulled the Wi-Fi for years, just because he heard other parents do the same to their kids. When other kids were mentioned, it usually meant they were firm on their decision, so I stormed into my room, ensuring each step echoed down the hallway. I slammed the door and even locked it, which is forbidden in our house. Once the anger and tears subsided, the worries flooded in. How would I keep in touch with potential friends? What about my streaks? What if my friends and others don’t like me anymore? What will I even do in my free time?
Getting my phone taken was becoming increasingly more frequent. It was like a never-ending cycle that only made things worse between my parents and me. To me, my phone wasn’t just a device. I saw it as a way to be relevant at school and secure pre-existing relationships. I believed that without it, my status among my peers would plummet, and the fragile balance in my friendships would tilt further against me.
—
“Hey.”
“Yeah?”
“What do you think about a social media cleanse?”
“A what?”
“Like not having social media for a week.”
“I would do it if you did it.”
“Let's do it.”
“Yeah, I have been spending too much time on it.”
This was the start of my journey to deleting social media forever.
So, several of my friends and I decided to remove all social media except for TikTok. For TikTok, we set a time limit of twenty minutes per day so that we didn’t end up spiraling like usual and watching for hours. I initially felt indifferent about the whole thing because, hey, it’s just an app, right? However, the first day was challenging; my twenty minutes were gone in a blink of an eye. It wasn't surprising, considering I use it every spare moment—whether first thing in the morning, during lunch, or even when I'm on the toilet. Consequently, I found myself staring at my bedroom wall in boredom.
Even after removing all the apps that could satisfy my dopamine craving, I kept checking my phone, hoping for any notification. It was as if my hand and mind were acting on muscle memory because I instinctively grabbed my phone and opened TikTok whenever I completed anything during those first few days. I desired the feeling of gratification, and social media satisfied that. Eventually, the week was over, and so was the social media detox. Unfortunately, I returned to the comfort of watching hours on TikTok, but I did delete Snapchat and Instagram. Yet, amid the relapse, a silver lining emerged. I had survived a week without the constant gratification of social media.
—
“What should we make the password?” my friend quipped.
“Let's make it something easy, so we don’t forget,” the other friend replied.
It was my freshman year in high school Latin class, and I had just asked my friends to create a passcode for my screen time. With the phone facing away from me, one of them started punching in a series of numbers. Afterward, they looked at each other and nodded in approval. I was trying to take measures to stop my TikTok addiction and realized that a literal passcode barrier would be the only way to stop it.
“Guys, you better not forget the password,” I said.
Grabbing my phone from their hands, I sighed. I remembered how hard it was not having TikTok and began thinking about how I would spend my free time. On the bright side, not having Snapchat or Instagram consistently for the past year made me no longer overthink.
Later, when I got home from school that day, I instinctually pulled up TikTok as a reward for surviving the day.
Time Limit
You’ve reached your time limit on TikTok.
“Are you serious? I swear I was only on it for like five minutes, not twenty, today,” I said, annoyed. But then I saw a little blue print labeled “Ignore Limit” below. I then knew that something had gone wrong when we were setting up the screen time limit. A battle unraveled in my brain. One part was telling me to put the phone down while a snake-like whisper tempted me to press the enticing blue script. I hesitated only briefly before succumbing to the whispers and pressing the poisonous blue. I distinctly remember feeling a pang of disappointment wash over me, but it was quickly replaced by the dancing lights and curious noises being emitted from TikTok. I found myself glued to the screen once again.
—
It had been a few months since my failed attempt at breaking my addiction to TikTok. I felt the familiar itch in my hand, tempting me to open Tiktok as I sat across my friends at lunch. As they laughed over an inside joke I wasn't a part of, I felt my loneliness intensify the need to escape into the shallow and addictive world of TikTok. No, I won’t let my urges win this time, I thought. Casting the negative thoughts to the side, I pulled out my lunch — sushi.
"Claire, you have sushi? Can I have some?" my friend Hayley inquired. "Me too!" chimed in my other friend, Kaitlyn.
"Yeah, sure!" I replied. It felt hard to say no. Although they were much closer and often excluded me, I still saw them as my friends. My sushi rolls began to disappear one by one, but I didn’t mind, considering I had plenty. However, irritation crept in as it kept disappearing. Then, to add to the frustration, Hayley accidentally spilled the soy sauce tray onto my new shoes.
“Are you serious?” I sighed exasperatedly. I reached down to wipe the soy sauce off.
“It’s not even that serious; it’ll come out,” Hayley replied dismissively as she barely even glanced at my shoes.
I looked at her, aghast. I expected some sort of apology, not this nonchalant response. "Hayley, I just got these shoes," I exclaimed.
She shrugged, seemingly unfazed by my distress. "Well, accidents happen. It's just soy sauce."
I was shocked by her lack of empathy. I never get mad, so I thought my distress would evoke some understanding or concern from her. I wiped the soy sauce off and sighed in relief, for it didn’t stain my shoes. However, my relief was replaced with disappointment and hurt as I saw Hayley and Kaitlyn casually walk over to the boy's table without a word to me. I was left all alone.
I realized that this incident ran deeper than just soy sauce on my shoes; it was the reality of my friend group. No matter how much I tried to turn a blind eye by watching TikTok, the reality was that I didn’t really matter that much to them. The pain deepened, particularly because Hayley used to be my best friend. However, I was now nothing other than a secondary friend who was taken for granted and seen as easily expendable.
It was time to let them go.
—
“Claire, where are you?” Hayley asked.
“Sorry, I’m eating with Ariette and Juliana today,” I replied.
“Oh, ok.”
“Yeah, I’ll talk to you later.” I hung up the phone.
In the first week after I stopped having lunch with Hayley and Kaitlyn, Hayley called me occasionally to check in to see where I was. However, as my absence continued, the calls became less frequent and eventually stopped altogether. As I ate with my new friends, I stopped going on TikTok. The joy of laughter and sense of inclusion was much more fulfilling than anything TikTok could offer me.
Spending time with people who appreciated me was the turning point in my life. I fixed unhelpful habits, started reading self-help books, and went into therapy. However, I still struggled to let TikTok go entirely. The reason for this was that I had hundreds of drafts
(saved videos) that would be deleted if I were to delete TikTok. It was hard to let my memories go, but not letting them go meant potentially falling back into the unhealthy cycle of endless watching. Still, even after knowing this, TikTok was the one thing I couldn’t let go of, even though I wanted it gone with all my heart. It sure felt like a toxic relationship.
—
“How did you break your phone again?” my dad asked.
“I dropped it in the shower,” I replied, peering at the lifeless blacked-out screen. “Yeah, assessing the damage here, it would probably cost more to fix the phone than to buy a new one,” the technician said as he inspected it.
I looked closer at my phone and realized how insignificant it was. It’s just… a thin block of metal and glass. I can’t believe I once thought this block was my reality. In a way, I felt grateful that my phone broke. It meant that my TikTok drafts and all the bad memories associated with it were gone. Like the prisoner in Plato's Cave, by a stroke of fate, I had finally broken free of the illusions. I would never fall back into the cave.
I enthusiastically scratched at my paper in my Sophomore year English class, writing down my thoughts and experiences. The writing prompt? “Do you think phones have taken over our lives?” Of course, they have. I experienced it firsthand. Once the time (only about five minutes) was up, the teacher collected the slips of paper.
“Ok, how about we read some of these!” the teacher exclaimed enthusiastically.
"Well, mine is definitely not going to get much of a positive response," I thought as I looked around the room filled with boys.
The teacher began reading the responses anonymously. Mine didn’t come up until after quite a few responses.
“This person said that they do think that phones have proved to have negative consequences in our lives. They mentioned that they deleted all social media and started journaling and meditating. How wonderful!"
The class erupted in snickers and snarky comments.
“Deleted social media? Who are they lying to?”
“Bro, who even meditates?”
After some serious process of elimination, they eventually found out that it was me. However, I actually didn’t feel embarrassed. I realized that some might have laughed due to peer pressure, others due to a lack of understanding, and perhaps a few still navigating the cave that once locked me in.
As class ended and everyone was piling out the door, the teacher called my name. “Claire, I am so sorry about those boys,” he said, his voice raised, for I was almost out the door.
“It’s ok! I don’t really care,” I replied with a sincere smile. And I truly didn’t.
The door closed, and I continued forward, smiling, as I recognized the growth within myself. Social media is not unhelpful. However, it was my addiction to social media that made it unhelpful. Before I fell into my addiction, social media was a way to get a laugh or find new beauty products. I didn’t feel insecure, lonely, or dissatisfied with my life. Yet, the longer I spent scrolling on these social media platforms, the more I got addicted. Social media clouded my view and my reality, plunging me into mental darkness. The only source of light and reality still came from my phone.
Eventually, I realized how pitiful the light from my phone was. It was not about quitting social media forever but rather about breaking free of the power of the reality of social media that I created. I had fallen into the cave of my own making. Unlike the man who returned to preach to the imprisoned, I already knew people didn’t appreciate
unsolicited wisdom. My next challenge would be to embrace the sunlight/ my own thoughts. In the cave, I couldn’t control my thoughts and fell into a repetitious cycle of being on my phone, captive to groupthink. Outside the cave, I could think for myself — a brave new world.
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