As a Very Online Millennial, 2024 was less than ideal for my mental health. Since we’ve entered the 2020s, I’ve kept feeling stuck in the ‘Can we go back to precedented times?’ meme. So I’m starting 2025 the only way I, a Millennial (and therefore someone who remembers the pre-app world), know how: with long-form content in the shape of a blog (#vintage) to set the tone for the new year and address one of the things that have been worrying me the most – my relationship with social media.
In typical Millennial nostalgic fashion, I’m doing this by revisiting old content. Why? Because, in the loop of tech hellscapes we now find ourselves in at the beginning of 2025, I spent most of my Christmas break offline, thinking about how social media have affected me in the past year and reminiscing of an essay I wrote in 2020, when I started feeling like social media platforms were no longer feeling fun for me.
2020 was the moment I collapsed my contexts, unifying my pole dancing and activist social media profiles with the academic ones. It was the time I became more visible and started the journey that would make me the researcher-activist I am now. It was when social media really became work, and also the time of lockdowns, the year George Floyd was killed by the Minneapolis police, kickstarting global movements, as we all became increasingly online and more divided by anti-vax conspiracy theories and anti-rights, anti-gender movements.
2020 simultaneously feels like yesterday and like a lifetime ago. So, when I re-read that old essay, I was surprised to find that I still resonated with my old self, and that I was already tired four years ago – before Elon Musk bought Twitter and turned public debate into even more of a toxic mess, meddling in international politics, and personally, before being a Very Online Millennial became not just a hobby but a job.
As a result, I’m giving that essay, which I posted on Medium back then, new life here, because a lot of you didn’t follow me in 2020. I conclude it with a 2025 post ‘X-odus‘ update, and some coping strategies.
I am not, of course, a representative of all Millennials. But I’ve felt a sense of kinship with the ‘generational loss’ I think we are experiencing, particularly after the latest general election in the United States, which saw Donald Trump win also thanks to social media-fuelled hate and tech bro investment. So here’s a blast from the not-so-distant past.
Voting data showing millenials are truly the best generation. Never taking fashion advice from gen z again, or music/culture advice from gen x, or financial advice from boomers (though truthfully…they clearly never knew what they were talking about anyway).
— Robyn Caplan (@robyncaplan) November 12, 2024
When A Millennial Tires of Social Media: A personal essay from the past (aka 2020)
It was last August, when a Facebook group I was part of was shut down by its admins due to increased fighting, that I realised I was tired. The conversation had turned vicious, the admins weren’t able to moderate it successfully, both sides had stopped “conversing”… and I did not interact. A few months earlier, I would have maybe written a blog post about it, about what the closure of the group meant, about why the conversations being had were important, and maybe about why they were rooted in already existing inequalities or tensions. Maybe I would have posted about it on my Instagram, at least. But I watched it happen, and moved on.
I’m a very specific type of Millennial. I came of age at a time when social media were increasingly becoming a space where people became who they were, or at least showed who they were. Part of my “rebellion” was sharing metal lyrics as a Facebook status or changing my name in Windows Live Messenger to something from an Alice Cooper song (ah, the irony of a teenage girl calling herself a “Flesh Fanatic Psychopath”). Social media were almost like an aspirational tool to understand your personality and perform it, to separate the baby metalheads like me from the Live, Love, Laugh popular girls.
My complicated relationship with social media, however, properly started in 2011. I was an Italian teen about to start a BA in Journalism at a London university, and as someone who had no internships or by-lines to show for herself, I only had one chance to show I wasn’t a teenage slacker to potential employers: start a blog. So start it I did, together with a Twitter profile. It was through that blog that I grew as a writer, found journalism internships, grew my media and blogger contacts, and finally ended up getting a job in PR. You could say that, thanks to social media, I was able to make a name for myself in a way I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to in pre-blogging and Twitter days.
My entrance into the journalism and UK university world coincided with the Arab Spring, the WikiLeaks revelations and the Phone Hacking Scandal. Social media, at the time, were both a blessing a course: they seemed like the social justice tool, allowing us to hear from people who did not have a platform or a voice before, almost overthrowing the world’s order; but they were the big bad wolf for the editors who came to speak to us at uni about the death of the newsroom. For me as a student, it was initially very confusing: am I contributing to the death of the newsroom by writing for free on a blog? But what if that is my only chance at a job?
That dilemma about the pros and the cons of social media has characterised my relationship with them. My feelings about social media were mixed: I liked having space to write, and social media were great for promotion; but, as a former PR and social media strategist turned social media academic, they were work. I always tried to take time off of them, and while I found it rewarding when my content travelled further than the people I knew, I never considered myself an influencer or particularly liked the word, not even when my network grew. Basically, while I was aware that social media’s main aim was to sell me stuff, and when I knew and experienced how addictive they can be, until a very short while ago social media’s pros outweighed the cons for me. Social media were, for me, a public forum where the possibilities were endless.
Without social media, I probably wouldn’t be where I am now: a social media PhD researcher, a blogger, an activist and a pole dance instructor. Thanks to my blog, my self-published novel and my activism [and now my research], I’ve been featured in the mainstream media multiple times, making an impact on the causes I was campaigning for and selling the products I was trying to promote. Thanks to my experience working in PR, I am now in the process of submitting a PhD on social media abuse and conspiracy theories [I’m now a Dr! I’ve submitted it and I’m done!], and I publish academic papers on a variety of social media related issues. After documenting my pole dance journey on Instagram, I was trained by a studio owner to teach pole dance, which is now one of my main sources of income [I’m now semi-retired, read about why here]. Without social media, my life would have probably been way less interesting.
This year, something has changed. It was in August 2020 that I began noticing how other people I know had grown tired. Other millennial folks like me, who used social media for work but also as a major form of self-presentation, of networking, of learning, were trying to take time off. Over the summer, I started receiving messages and seeing posts in the likes of:
“Hi, sorry for the late reply, I’m trying to take some time off social media.”
“I will be on this platform a bit less. Take care x.”
“I’ve decided to take a bit of a break from Twitter. I will only use it for work purposes.”
Change was afoot
It all hit me when that pole dancing Facebook group I was part of was suddenly closed. After so many Facebook groups and Instagram profiles saw what looked like proper social media battles between #BlackLivesMatter supporters and people who could not really fathom why Black lives should also matter (a.k.a. all lives matter folk), now the battle was raging on another, similar front. Despite the fact that the pole industry was founded and is still highly populated by strippers, a lot of pole dancers still insist on distancing themselves from those who created our sport. At the same time, strippers are rightly angry at this behaviour, and they are becoming very vocal about it on social media. The conversation got out of hand, and with the group being moderated by two volunteers based in the United Kingdom, interactions became toxic and the admins, who managed the group outside of working or sleeping hours, could not dilute the conversation between time zones and offline commitments.
Part of it, I’m sure, is due to lockdown. In the annus horribilis that is 2020, for a while, social media had been one of the few things keeping us connected with our loved ones. In my network, mainly made of pole dancers, sex workers, body positive and sex positive activists, we took part in a lot of picture challenges and came up with home content ideas. The naked selfie challenge to love your body in lockdown, or learning specific dances, or coming up with choreographies we could teach and that students could learn from home. We had online performances and shows. Online classes. We were always connected. We lived on social media — some of us, me included, completely alone and isolated from our loved ones.
It was the convergence of lockdown’s hyperconnectivity with the affordances of what social media are set to do that started tiring me out. Affordances are the characteristics of a certain tool or space that allow certain things to happen. For instance, social media are spaces whose infrastructure is designed to allow you to share almost unfiltered content, and to network, to connect you with people you wouldn’t normally have had access to. But social media have processes that also allow brands, organisations and individuals to sell items and promote themselves. They are a promotion tool built in such an addictive way that brings people back to look at things, and buy them. While social media showed their potential to raise awareness about the plight of certain groups or populations, I am not sure we know what to do with that awareness.
In June, that became very clear. After the horrific death of George Floyd, a lot of people in my network started sharing the viral video of his last moments on Earth, infographics, quotes, educational slideshows around systemic racism and anti-racism. It was not uncommon to see someone share 20, 30 Instagram stories a day: I and people in my network wanted to raise awareness, publish our opinion on racial justice, or at least show solidarity. At the same time, a variety of brand debacles showed that posting your hot take on social media to be on top of the news agenda or to keep hold of your customers sounded trite and disingenuous, and didn’t actually improve the fight for the cause or start constructive conversations. The statements themselves did not actually admit any racism by the companies who wrote them and, as Amber M. Hamilton recently wrote, they put the onus on Black people who were “discriminated because of the colour of their skin” while “allowing companies to absolve themselves of responsibility for racism.”
In short, we learnt that while social media may be great to review a new fashion item, they’re not as great to discuss something as complex as police brutality or racial injustice. They are winning as a promotion tool, but failing us as a public forum. So those of us who understood social media as a public forum are tired.
Reasons for my Millennial fatigue in 2020
Personally, I am tired because it’s never been clearer that social media are only here to sell us ads. The pros that, for me, outweighed the cons, have now backfired on an infrastructural, political and on a social level.
On an infrastructural level, social media now have in-built processes to ensure certain content doesn’t travel far so that the space’s selling potential isn’t affected. But because such processes are carried out by algorithms created by a specific demographic of workers, content in the public interest is often falling under the umbrella of objectionable content. This happens to newsworthy pictures related to the reporting of war crimes as much as to single users, showing that our voices and content have to conform to how platforms are structured in order to allow them to still sell ads.
When posting my pole dancing progress on Instagram I, like various athletes, models, sex workers, artists, etc., have been repeatedly ‘shadowbanned’, or hidden from the explore page without my knowledge, resulting in the inability to find new followers and audiences – see my paper here. A policy repeated across various social networks, the shadowban is a product of social media’s algorithms and infrastructures that is meant to “ghettoise” undesiderable users and that goes against what social media platforms claim they are doing: bringing people together. In my research, I have found that this reproduces offline inequalities and is a result of social media’s increasingly ungovernable superpower.
On a political level, we’ve seen how the affordances of social media can be mined to influence voting behaviour, with world-changing consequences. Cambridge Analytica harvested people’s social media data to swing their votes in the 2016 United States election and in the Brexit referendum. This meant feeding users content that confirmed their existing views and fears about the opposing side. Platforms were used to enforce differences, bringing people together in their voting behaviour, but setting them apart in their views, beliefs and — considering how many relationship have been strained by political opinions recently — in life.
And then, on a social level, there are those examples of people coming together under shared interests… when they probably wouldn’t have in the past, like in our pole dance groups. In Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, Jaron Lanier questioned social media activism arguing that the very same platforms used to connect people with a shared view can end up emboldening their opponents. He argues that the algorithm takes a positive social movement and shows it to a bunch of people who are likely to be enraged by it, introducing them to each other and inflaming their conversation for profit, until they become an even scarier version of themselves.
In an article for the European Journal of Communications, Rune Karlsen, Kari Steen-Johnsen, Dag Wollebæk and Bernard Enjolras, too, argued that debates on social media are not stunted by echo chambers, but by trench warfare: by pitting people with equally strong but different views together, social media platforms are increasing polarisation through heightened confrontation. So people don’t comment under posts to change their mind — they want to show that they are right. And they go away outraged at their opponents’ opinions, but feeling even stronger about their opinions than when they went in.
Offline, you do not often come across confrontations with people that have such a polarising view that warrants a never-ending argument. But online, you may have joined that interest group — say, about books — and suddenly people who like books, but disagree about transgender rights, find themselves arguing under the same post about that one author who keeps banging on about the problems with gender-neutral bathrooms. These people may have not had these complex conversation offline: they would have met at a bookshop, made some small talk, bought a book and gone home. Their ideas wouldn’t have come together. But now, on a new space, they are suddenly poles apart. And the fight rages on.
Further division and tiredness are brought by the fact that the context of social media is collapsing, accelerated by lockdowns and by polarising events on the global stage, because one person’s understanding of what social media are is different from everybody else’s. And without a framework, there’s a lot of noise, and a lot of anger that originates from unkept promises about social media’s potential as a public forum.
Seeing social media as a public forum to overthrow concepts of privilege and power was not totally unreasonable. In Women and Power, Mary Beard wrote about Twitter that:
“It was supposed to put us directly in touch with those in power, and open up a new democratic kind of conversation. It does almost nothing of the sort: if we tweet the prime minister or the Pope, they no more read our words than if we send them a letter — and for the most part, the prime minister does not even write the tweets that appear under her or his name.”
People like me went on social media to have a platform to share our words and pictures outside of the mainstream media scenario that did not have a place for us. We went on it to be part of a public forum and reach new readers. But social media’s need to appear respectable in order to keep selling is taking NSFW memes off tumblr, nipples off Instagram and music off of Facebook — and not everyone agrees that social media should even be a public forum.
Some people went on social media to keep in touch with their childhood friends and share pictures of their dog, not to be told they were racists or transphobic by some social justice activist kid. Others have come on social media as an extension of their career, treating their profiles as publication, keeping it respectable and “safe”.
And of course, social media platforms came here to make money and sell us ads, and now they have to deal with women who want to be able to share pictures of their nipples and with racists and transphobes at the same time. They just wanted to make money, and now they actually have to police content, like a state. They are connecting us, but what are we doing with that hyperconnectivity?
Why social media are not productive
Social media connection doesn’t mean productive social media discussion. As Tarleton Gillespie wrote, “platform” is a very broad term, allowing social media companies to portray themselves in a positive light for both users and advertisers without taking responsibility for the content posted on them. Because of this aptly vague terminology, social media are not telling us how to interact, other than through their also aptly vague community guidelines. So they have become an arena, where no consensus or no conclusion is reached, but products are still being bought.
People in my network wish for an intersectional society, but social media are not the right space for that intersectionality to come together in a meaningful way. Through social media, people become aware of that intersectionality, but instead of being pleased by it, they are increasingly polarised by it. And if you, like me, understood social media as a public forum for learning about different realities and sharing your stories, you may find this increasingly tiring, straining even.
In my PhD, I use General Strain Theory — Robert Agnew’s theory that certain individuals might react to a strainful or stressful event by committing crime — to understand why certain people engage in online abuse, or trolling. I call it “crowd strain”: a general, pervasive sense of tiredness caused by a perceived tiredness with their lack of power on the global stage, a sense of offline powerlessness that results in social media anger, egged on by social media’s own affordances. I think some of that strain is causing anger, and some of it, in my case, is causing tiredness.
I don’t have an answer that fixes my tiredness, and I don’t think a digital detox, or a digital shutdown, will fix it. Social media are now embedded within the fabric of our society and of the global economy: we cannot just make them go away at the snap of our fingers, and I don’t think getting rid of them would even benefit us.
What is striking however is that, so far, platforms have pretty much been able to make their own laws, and the law of the land hasn’t kept up: states have allowed social media platforms to define themselves, and while increasing investments are put into fighting cyber-crime, the lack of clear definitions of and expectations from social media companies is worrying.
Corpo-civic spaces
In one of my latest academic papers, I propose to define social media as a “corpo-civic” space, to create a balance between platform duties and user expectations at a time where social networks are both a social and a work space, owned and administered by private corporations. Offline, civic spaces that are privately owned are still subject to laws and to human rights. Online, social media platforms should be bound by the same rules, forcing them to be clearer and more transparent about their processes and therefore, hopefully, fairer.
This doesn’t solve our context collapse, or our tiredness, but it would allow us to understand what we can expect from social media. I wonder if and how this tiredness I feel, this new generational disillusion that I seem to share with a lot of people in my network, will shape social media as spaces. I wonder if we will leave our current spaces and migrate elsewhere, to smaller platforms that do better by their users. I wonder if the current social media business model has become so lucrative and successful so fast that it will soon explode, like a new financial crash.
What I do know is that in this Covid-19 world, I, a Millennial whose identity is largely connected with social media, am re-evaluating these platforms’ potential, how I use them, understand them and their role in society. This is tiring and uncomfortable. But it’s a re-valuation that is happening in offline conversations and self-interrogations, rather than underneath forums that have stopped producing meaningful outcomes.
The X-odus, a millennial sense of’generational loss’ and community fragmentation
Reading my 2020 essay on Millennial fatigue in 2025 felt like a deja-vu. Part of me feels frustrated: Have I really not learnt anything? Why have I not improved my relationship with social media since 2020?
Yet, when I’m being kinder to myself, I remember that the world and my life have not stopped, and that the era of precedented times is over.
I’m now more critical of the free labour social media drag out of creators, having published several studies on the creator economy: the opportunities platforms provided were, of course, never totally ‘free’, and our time and data were the product. The concept of public square from my paper above, which wasn’t my most successful, likely died the moment Elon Musk walked into Twitter HQ with that damn sink.
Still, I thought my 2020 essay would feel way more dated than it feels now. But the feelings I describe feel the same, only worse. 2020 was just the beginning.
I don’t love speaking about generations – it feels like a memetic generalisation, and an inaccurate one at that since I can’t reasonably poll every Millennial, Gen X, Gen Z or Boomer person. But I do feel like the generational differences separating those in government, those in charge of platform companies and social media users are at the very least partly responsible for the mess we’re in.
My feelings of Millennial fatigue because of social media cannot be separated from the world we live in. The polarisation we’ve seen in lockdown since the death of George Floyd hasn’t decreased. If anything, we’re more online and more divided, with social media gaining even more of an information/misinformation role in some of the biggest crises of our time, such as the invasion of Ukraine and the ongoing genocide in Palestine. Meanwhile, the far-right has effectively exploited the creator economy and the fact that speech is largely still unregulated (while nudity is over-moderated) online to influence elections and foster division, uniting people only via the anger they feel. Watching all of this happen as an internet scholar that observes the intersection of online harms and censorship goes beyond Millennial fatigue, and feels more like powerlessness in front of historic events.
As a digital cultural scholar, I think we are fundamentally ignoring the devastating impact that misogynist dude bro creators are having on young men. The dudes who look up to M*sk, R*gan, T*te, and P*ul brothers are going to keep voting in the future and we need a plan
— Brandon C Harris, PhD ? (@Harris216) November 6, 2024
This powerlessness is sometimes generated by the very Millennial feeling that generations of digital natives that have followed us are not necessarily going to be more progressive than us: with Gen Z men being radicalised to vote for the far-right in the US election, we are literally stuck between those who understand too little about platforms to regulate them, and those who are in too deep to get out of them.
Watching Gen Z men veer right hits different for Millennials. We lived through Columbine, 9/11, the Iraq War, 2008 crash, 2016 election, covid, abortion bans, & now this. We watched institutions repeatedly fail us while older generations selfishly protected the status quo. ?1/
— thatonemaddy.bsky.social (@thatonemaddy) November 7, 2024
It doesn’t help that some of the apps that heralded the change that characterised my digital Millennial coming of age, the apps on which I based my undergraduate and PhD theses and where my community and my work were formed are now a dumpster fire.
Most of my colleagues and I are ‘apped out’. Many of us now feel gross at posting on Twitter since the Musk take-over, and while many have partaken in an X-odus from Twitter to BlueSky, many of us (me included) still have an account and lurk.
Posting on Twitter feels like feeding Elon’s machine, engaging with a platform that is responsible for misinformation and division and running the risk of being boosted to the wrong audience. Even The Guardian newspaper announced they are no longer posting on Twitter, and so have many journalists, activists, personalities.
However, the alternatives are just not that great.
Meta has just announced they will remove fact-checkers in the US, and are now allowing blatant homophobia and transphobia while only focusing of freedom of speech for people they like.
Threads is yet another sanitised, Meta-owned app to pour our labour into. Mastodon never really happened. And what seemed to be happening for me – BlueSky, which gave many users hope – is low on engagement, now high on bots and on labelling anything body-related as porn. Most of my audience and people I read remain on Twitter, and fully leaving, as the tweets below show, is not easy, particularly because the alternatives aren’t great.
You think I’m gonna let Elon push me off this website? I’ve been here since Balloon Boy. I posted through covfefe, shrimp cereal, Bean Dad. I know who Giovanna Plowman is. 30k people follow my tweets about wanting to fuck Kermit the Frog. I’ll stop posting here when I’m dead
— Ej Dickson (@ejdickson) November 13, 2024
It feels worth saying that leaving Twitter IS a hard decision for those of us who have made a community here. For me it’s the place I found my people over and over. As well as a place I found a lot of work as a creative.
— Dr Emily Garside (@EmiGarside) November 14, 2024
It’s not “just” a social media platform.
On LinkedIn – yet another app to trial for those lost in the X-odus – Prof. Claes De Vreese wrote about communicating in the age of “academic fragmentation,” and maybe that’s also where the tiredness comes from. The attempt to keep ourselves safe while finding and sharing work and maintaining a community feels like another layer of free labour we are putting into platforms. This also adds to my self-presentation anxiety, or my need to manage multiple audiences in collapsed digital contexts, as I wrote in a recent blog post.
Fatigue, frustration and a sense of Millennial ‘generational loss’ essentially characterise my experience on social media now. I’m no longer inspired or driven by platforms now. They are just work, or occasionally a source of brainrot thanks to memes and pet content. I call this fatigue ‘generational loss’ because, if you are a Millennial and remember the possibilities platforms offered on a personal, professional and global level, seeing the hellscapes spearheaded by Musk and Zuckerberg become what they’ve become feels like mourning opportunity and hope.
Watching platforms being simultaneously trivialised and turned into sources of moral panics by politicians who also profit from division makes a solution seem even further or impossible, compounding that sense of loss with the loss felt over global crises, the cost of living, poverty, the diffusion of far-right ideology and the shrinking of world-wide rights.
So is going offline the answer?
What does being on social media feel like right now?
If you got here, congratulations. All I’ve given you is doom and gloom, so it’s time to talk about coping strategies.
The only 2025 goal I want stick to is truly revisiting my relationship with social media, and making it useful. In recognising how positive a space social media were for me as a young millennial, my therapist also pushed me to reconsider what being on platforms feels like right now.
The answer is: not good, pretty stressful. So something’s gotta give.
I’m not a believer in things being black and white: social media still have good and bad sides. It’s through platforms that I still find work and community, that I express myself and that I learn from others. That I want to keep in 2025.
Fully going offline is not the answer, not just in my line of work but in following trends in society. However, being less online may be an answer.
I can’t be a critical internet scholar if I’m not online, but I can’t be critical of the internet if it stresses me out so much either.
Social media platforms are increasingly work for me, in my academic, performing and creator life. As such, I really only want to access them – and particularly Instagram – once a day when I have to post. The time-sucking, the feeling of never doing enough, the cancellation anxiety of doing / saying something wrong are just not useful to me, nor helpful to my wellbeing, creativity, academic or activist work – especially in a year when I’m on the job market again, when I’ll hopefully write a book and continue training/performing while cultivating real relationships.
So I’m going be selfish and use platforms only for my own gain. I’m going to limit my time on them instead of letting them ruin my life, make me angrier and lonelier as their algorithms seem to do to all of us. I’m going to do way more digital detoxes, and only go online once a day to check my messages and post what I need to post for work or self-expression, because being offline during Christmas really gave me a sense of perspective.
None of us is so important that we need to check, comment on and respond to things 24/7.
I’m still going to be there for my community. But I’m going to bring my social media use back to what it was in 2012 at the height of my Millennial coming-of-age, before the DM overload, the never-ending stories and the X-odus. So if you need me urgently, email me.
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