The Mind of Those Who Avoid Social Media – Alan Watts

Hinzugefügt: 2026-05-09

[00:00:09]There is something you will never be able to get out of your head after this video. And I'm not saying it as a cheap hook. I'm saying it because what you are about to hear is something you've been feeling for a while.

[00:00:24]something that has been living inside you without you having the exact words to name it. And when finally someone gives them to you, there is no turning back. It's 3:00 in the morning. You can't sleep. Your phone is face down on the nightstand. [music] And for a few seconds before turning it over, you have a very strange feeling, a kind of relief, as if a part of you knew that.

[00:00:50]As long as you don't look at it, [music] the world cannot reach you. And then you flip it and you start. The infinite scroll, the stories, the [music] photos, the comments from people you don't even know about things that don't matter.

[00:01:05][music] And when you finally let go of it, 40 minutes later, there is something in your chest that weighs a little more than before. You don't know exactly [music] what it is, but it's there. It's always there. Now, think of someone you know who doesn't use social media. I don't mean someone who uses it a little, but someone who simply isn't there. No Instagram, no Tik Tok, no Twitter, no nothing. Think about how that makes you feel. Curiosity, admiration, a hint of envy that you don't dare acknowledge, or perhaps something even more unsettling.

[00:01:45]a slight feeling that this person knows something you don't.

[00:01:50]As if they had discovered an emergency exit that [music] the rest of the world doesn't see. As if they were playing the same game as everyone else, but with completely different rules. That is no coincidence.

[00:02:03]And today we are going to delve into it.

[00:02:06]We are going to explore layers that are not usually touched upon in these types of conversations because there is a mind behind the person who decides to leave.

[00:02:17]There is a specific psychology. There is a process, a pain, a clarity and a way of seeing reality that most people are not prepared [music] to understand. And in the midst of all this, there is a man, a philosopher, a guy who died in 1973 and who, without ever having seen a smartphone, [music] described with terrifying precision exactly what happens to you every time you open that app. His name was Alan Watts, and what he [music] said 50 years ago is more relevant today than any neuroscience study published this year.

[00:02:55]Let's start where it hurts. Why do you use social media? Don't give me the answer you'd give your boss or your mother. Give me the real one. The 3 a.m.

[00:03:06]one. You use them because you are afraid. It's not the only reason, but it's the one in charge. Fear of missing out. Fear of being left out. Fear that the world keeps spinning and you're not on the map. There is a term that has become very popular for this. FOMO. the fear of missing out. But that term became too small a long time ago because it doesn't capture the real depth of the problem. It's not just fear of missing an event or a [music] trend. It's fear of not existing. It's the fear that if you stop posting, reacting, or appearing, people will forget you are there. And with that, [music] somehow you stop being real. Alan Watts had a word for this. Well, he had many.

[00:03:58]But there was a concept he returned to time and again. He called it the ego as an illusion of continuity. The idea that the human mind constructs a fictional narrative of itself to feel permanent in a world that is in essence impermanent.

[00:04:16]Your name, your history, your achievements, your photos, your opinions. All of those are pieces of a character that your brain [music] has manufactured to give you the illusion that you are something fixed, something stable, something that is not going to disappear. And social media is the latest and most sophisticated [music] technology we have invented to feed that illusion. When you upload a photo, you are not sharing a moment. You are building evidence [music] that you exist. When someone gives you a like.

[00:04:51]They are not appreciating you. They are confirming that the character [music] you built is believable. And that confirmation, that little pulse of dopamine lasts exactly as long as it takes to fade, which is very little. And then you need more. Always more. Not because you are weak, but because the system is designed exactly for that, so that the tank never fully fills up. Now comes the part that is going to make you uncomfortable. The person who doesn't use social media has understood something about that [music] mechanism that you are still processing.

[00:05:28]Not necessarily in a conscious way. Not everyone who leaves social media does so because they've read once [music] or had a Buddhist epiphany at 4 in the afternoon. Many do it because they reach a point of saturation so deep that the body simply says enough. And in that enough, there is more wisdom than it seems. There is fascinating research on this phenomenon. A study published by the University of Pennsylvania in 2018 showed something that you already knew deep down. Limiting social media use to about 30 minutes a day significantly reduced levels of anxiety, depression, and loneliness in participants.

[00:06:11]It didn't eliminate them. It reduced them with just 30 minutes.

[00:06:17]Right now, how much time do you spend a day inside those apps? Not what you think, but the real amount, the one your own phone records. Look at it. really look at it and let that [music] number tell you something. But let's go deeper because the psychology of those who avoid social media doesn't start the [music] moment they decide to quit. It starts much earlier. It starts with a specific type of sensitivity. [music] There are people who from the beginning have a different relationship with overstimulation. People who feel uncomfortable with the constant social noise with the implicit expectation of always being available, always reactive, always in response mode. Psychologists speak of high sensory processing sensitivity, a trait that approximately 20% [music] of the population has and which doesn't mean emotional weakness, but exactly the opposite. [music] a deeper processing capacity that makes the excess of information not just annoying [music] but genuinely exhausting. For those people, social media is not a tool for connection. It is a continuous low-level aggression, a white noise that never stops. And the decision to leave is not an escape. It is a physiological necessity as [music] basic as sleep. But there is another type of person who also leaves. And this is the one that interests me the most. The one I find most psychologically fascinating. It is someone who doesn't have that high sensitivity trait [music] innately, but who at some point in their life had an awakening, a crack in the illusion, something that broke the silent consensus that all of this is normal, that this is just how it is, that if you're not on social media, you're a weirdo [music] or a misfit. And that awakening usually comes from a very specific place. It usually comes from a moment in which that [music] person realizes they have been living for the screen for a long time [music] instead of living for life. It can be something small, a sunset [music] you couldn't enjoy because you were thinking about whether the photo would look good. A conversation with someone you loved that you interrupted three times to look at your phone. The feeling of arriving home after a beautiful day and realizing you remember almost nothing because your mind was somewhere else. Alan Watts would call that moment a touch of reality. And what he said about these moments is chilling in its precision. He said that most human beings live in what he called the eternal postponement. The unconscious belief that real life starts later when I have more money, when I find a partner, when I get that job, when I have more followers, when I reach a certain goal, and meanwhile, [music] real life, the one happening right now this very second, slips through the fingers without anyone claiming it.

[00:09:24]Social media is the perfect mechanism for eternal postponement.

[00:09:29]It keeps you always in a state of [music] pre-life.

[00:09:33]Always looking at what others have and comparing [music] it to what you don't have yet. Always in an anxious anticipation that is never resolved.

[00:09:43]Always about to arrive at a place that doesn't exist. And the person who decides to leave on some level has broken that contract. They have said even without words that they are not willing to continue mortgaging the present for the empty promise of something that never arrives. Now I'm going to tell you something that might bother you. Not because it's a criticism, but because it touches [music] something you already know and prefer not to look at directly. Most people don't leave social media because they are afraid of what they will find if they leave. Not fear of [music] missing out on things we've already seen that but fear of meeting the silence.

[00:10:25]Fear that without the constant noise without the endless [music] stream of stimuli and without perpetual distraction. Something that has been waiting a long time to be attended [music] to will appear. And what appears in that silence is different for each person. For some it is a loneliness they didn't know they had. For others, it is a question about the meaning of what they are doing with [music] their life.

[00:10:52]For others, it is an old sadness they had buried under layers and layers of content consumed at breakneck [music] speed.

[00:11:00]Vertical scrolling is not just entertainment. It is anesthesia. And like all anesthesia, [music] when it stops working, the pain that was there is still there. There is a concept in psychology called experiential avoidance.

[00:11:17]Basically, [music] it is the human tendency to move away from internal thoughts, emotions, or sensations [music] that we perceive as threatening or uncomfortable. And it is one of the most powerful predictors of long-term psychological distress. Not because difficult emotions are dangerous, but because the more you avoid them, the more power they accumulate. The fear you don't look at grows in the dark. Social media is, among other things, an extraordinarily efficient tool for experiential avoidance. Never in human history have we had a mechanism so accessible, so immediate, and so socially accepted to escape the present moment. [music] And the trap is that while you do it, you don't feel like you are running away. You feel like you are connecting, [music] that you are in the know, that you are participating in something. But Watts saw it [music] coming and described it with an image that still stirs something inside me. He said that the modern human being is like someone who is hungry and [music] instead of eating spends their time reading menus. They are informed about all the restaurants in the world, have access to all the recipes, are able to describe in detail every flavor they have never tasted, and they are starving to death. Let that sink in. The life you are looking at on the screen is not your life. Other people's lives are not a substitute for yours. And yet we have been functioning for years as if they were as if observing were enough. As if consuming someone else's experience filled the void of our own. Now we are going to talk about what really [music] happens inside the mind of someone who has been away from all that for a while because there are stages and they are much more interesting than you imagine.

[00:13:14]The first stage is what we could call social withdrawal syndrome. And I'm not exaggerating with that term. When someone who has had intensive social media use stops using them suddenly, the brain protests and it does so in a very specific way. A diffuse restlessness appears. A feeling that something [music] is missing without knowing exactly what. There is a repetitive impulse to pick up the phone that activates dozens of times a day in a completely automatic way. There are moments when something interesting happens and the first thought is I have to upload [music] this and then comes the dissonance of realizing there is nowhere to upload anything anymore. And with that dissonance [music] sometimes something similar to grief arises. This is not a metaphor.

[00:14:05]Neuroscience has [music] documented that the brain processes digital social isolation in a way similar to how it processes [music] the loss of a relationship. The reward circuits which had become accustomed to receiving external validation at regular intervals suddenly find themselves without that stimulus and the brain which is conservative by nature interprets [music] that as a threat. The second stage if the person holds out is much more interesting.

[00:14:35]Something starts to happen that psychologists call attentional reconsolidation.

[00:14:40]The ability to pay attention, which had been fragmented by years of exposure to content designed to constantly interrupt focus, slowly begins to recover. People who go through this describe a very characteristic feeling. They start to notice things they didn't notice before.

[00:14:58][music] The rhythm of a conversation, the texture of a silence, the taste of a meal that they previously ate while looking at their phone without realizing it. It's as if [music] they had been living in low resolution for years. And suddenly the image becomes sharper. And here is where Alan Watts becomes not only relevant but completely [music] essential to understanding what is happening. Because what that attentional reconsolidation describes is exactly what Watts called living in the present.

[00:15:30]Not as an abstract spiritual concept, nor as a meditation slogan for a t-shirt, but as a real experience, as the difference [music] between being in your life and thinking about your life.

[00:15:43]Watts said something that seems simple, but if you look at it head on breaks you in two. He said that the present moment is the only thing that truly exists.

[00:15:55]That the past is memory. that the future is imagination and that the only accessible reality [music] is this instant, not the next one, but this one.

[00:16:07][music] And that the tragedy of the contemporary human being is that they spend practically their entire existence anywhere but here. Think about it in this moment while you listen to this.

[00:16:19]How much of your attention is really here? What part of your mind is in something that happened before? In something that might happen later, in something someone said, in something you could do, or in something you should have done. The present is a room in which almost no one lives, but for which we all have the key. And the third stage in the mind of someone who has been away from social media for a while is the most [music] difficult to describe and the most revealing. It is a kind [music] of reconfiguration of identity because there is something no one tells you when you enter social media and that is that little by little you build a version of yourself [music] that exists to be consumed.

[00:17:04]A character cared for, edited and optimized to generate a certain response in others. And that character over time starts to colonize your real identity.

[00:17:17]You start to see yourself as others see you on the screen. You start to make decisions not because of what you want, but because of what that character would do, what they would eat, where they would go, what they would think, how they would react. It is what Watts called confusing the map with the territory. The map is the representation. The territory is the reality. And when you live inside the map for too long, you forget that [music] there is a territory. You forget that beneath the character, there is a person. That beneath the public version, there is a private version that has gone without attention for a long time. When someone leaves social media and faces [music] that silence we talked about before, one of the things that can appear is exactly that, the question of who they are without the screen. who they are without the followers, without the likes, without the constant performance. And that question can be terrifying, or it can be the most liberating one you've asked yourself in years. It all depends on whether you are willing to stay with it long enough for it to give you an honest answer. There are people who cannot stand that [music] question and they return. They return because the emptiness they find is unbearable to them. And I don't judge them. The void is not easy. But you have to understand that they didn't create [music] that void by leaving. That void was there before. Social media simply covered it up so well that it couldn't be seen. And there are people who stay in that silence, who hold out, who go through the initial restlessness, the withdrawal, the feeling of irrelevance, and the question of who they are. And on the other side of all that, what they find is not a state of enlightenment or a perfect life. They find something much simpler and much more valuable. They find their own rhythm. They find the kind of attention that is only possible when there is nothing constantly fighting to capture it. They find conversations that last for hours and leave a mark.

[00:19:31]>> [music] >> They find the pleasure of being bored without immediately looking for how to fill it. They find ultimately [music] that there is life at a speed that social media had made seem boring.

[00:19:43][music] Watts had a phrase that I haven't been able to get out of my head for a while. He said that life does not have a purpose in the sense that a hammer has a purpose. Life is music and music doesn't go anywhere. Music simply is.

[00:19:59]And when you listen to it well, when you really pay attention to it, you don't need it to get anywhere specific for it to be worth it. Social media has sold us the idea that life has to be in permanent movement towards something, more followers, more reach, more impact, more visibility. And in that perpetual movement, in that constant search for a destination that always shifts forward, we have lost something fundamental. We have lost the ability to simply stay in the sound. In the note that is playing now, I want to tell you about a thought experiment [music] that I find revealing.

[00:20:41]Imagine that tomorrow all social media ceases to exist. Suddenly, without warning, they disappear. What do you feel in the first [music] minute, in the first hour? After 3 days, take a real moment to [music] think about it. Don't give me the answer that sounds good, but the real one. Because what you feel in that thought experiment tells you a lot about what place they occupy in your life and what psychological function they are fulfilling beyond what you believe. If the first response is relief, that says something. If the first response is panic, that says something different. If the first response is a sense of loss of identity, that says something that deserves your attention for longer than you normally give these things. The psychology behind those who avoid social media is not the psychology of someone who has given up on the world. It is the psychology of someone who has given up on a specific type of world to be able to live in another. one that is [music] slower, denser, harder to quantify, and less visible to others, but more their own, more inhabited, more theirs. And what Watts would add, what I think he would add if he were here, is that you don't have to leave social media to recover all that. Although sometimes it helps, what you have to do, what is really difficult, and what no one is going to do for you is learn to relate to them from a different place. From a place where you choose when you enter and when you leave. From a place where you know that what is outside the screen doesn't need validation from anyone to be real.

[00:22:23]From a place where silence is not a threat but a habitable [music] space. And that requires a type of inner work that scares many people. It requires sitting with discomfort instead of sliding over it. It requires asking yourself questions [music] for which there isn't always an immediate answer.

[00:22:43]It requires, in Watts language, letting go of control. Stop trying to manage the image the world has of you and trust that what you are without filters, without editing, and without performances [music] is enough. Is it?

[00:23:01]Do you believe you are without all that?

[00:23:04]Because there is the real core of everything we've been talking about. Not in the apps, nor in the algorithms, nor in the metrics, [music] but in that question. In whether you believe that what you are when no one is looking has value. In whether you can sustain your own existence without the external support of constant [music] confirmation. Watts said that the problem with the ego is that it always needs an audience, that it cannot [music] exist in private, that its very nature is performative. And that is why the only way to go beyond the ego [music] is not to destroy it, which is impossible, but to learn not to identify completely with it. Learn to see yourself as something bigger, more fluid, harder to fit into a profile bio and a grid of perfectly selected images.

[00:23:55]That is not achieved overnight. That is a lifelong job. But there is something very concrete you can do right now.

[00:24:03]Something so small it seems ridiculous.

[00:24:06]But if you really do it changes everything. You can turn off your phone for 1 hour. Not silence it. [music] Turn it off and stay there with what is with who you are when there is nothing looking. And see what appears. Boredom might appear. Fine, stay with it.

[00:24:26]Anxiety might appear. Fine, stay with it. An idea might appear that had been waiting for a space to exist for a long time. A memory might appear. Something you didn't expect [music] might appear.

[00:24:41]The only way to know what is in that silence is to stay in it long enough for it to speak. Because everything we have been exploring today, the mind of those who avoid social media, the psychology of the present, the illusion of the ego, the eternal postponement, experiential avoidance converges on one point, on the question of whether you are willing to be in your life, not to document [music] it, not to show it, not to compare it, simply to be in it. [music] If this video has stirred something inside you, if it has made you think [music] about something you've been avoiding looking at for a while, I ask you one thing.

[00:25:22]Subscribe [music] to this channel right now. Turn on the bell so you don't miss any videos. Leave a comment with what resonated with you, what made you uncomfortable, or the phrase that stopped you. Share this with someone who needs to hear it, even if they don't know they need it yet. Because if you do, if you take that step of participating instead of just consuming, something moves. The psychology behind active involvement is radically different from that of passive observation. And that difference, that small difference of moving from spectator to participant is exactly the kind of presence that Watts spent his whole life trying to teach us to cultivate. The noise is [music] not going to stop. The algorithms are not going to change their target. The world is not going to slow down to wait for you. But you can decide at what speed you live. You can decide what kind of attention you give to your own [music] existence. You can decide if the present moment is a place worth staying [music] in. And that decision, that specific one, no one makes for you. Not Watts, nor any philosopher, [music] nor any YouTube channel. You make it now or you don't. And that is also a choice.