Zakkarie Montgomery-Cole reveals why he deleted his social media accounts

Zakkarie Montgomery-Cole has managed to wipe all of his social media accounts and his life is completely different. Here he reveals why and what’s changed.

Zakkarie Montgomery-Cole, 27, quit social media in 2020, but relapsed a year later before deleting them a second time. This is how he did it, his opinion of every app and what he has achieved now that he doesn’t waste time scrolling. Oh yes, and he can’t remember the last time he took a selfie.

X

Deleting Twitter (X) was the easiest. I used to follow authors and political leaders the most. After a while I realised I didn’t care too much about what they were posting and just deleted them individually and then my account.

Zakkarie Montgomery-Cole, 27, has given up social media because of the impact it was having on his life. Picture: Natasha Emeck

Tinder

Tinder is pretty easy to delete. At first some people you match with will talk to you.

They either keep talking to you until they don’t, ask to move the conversation to another app like Facebook or Snapchat (which is usually not going to happen because I didn’t have the other apps) the conversation dies afterwards, never respond in the first place.

Or, you go on a date with someone who is the dullest, most uninteresting person you’ve ever met in your life. This may be attributed to people being politically correct and trying not to gossip or rubbish other people, which is unfortunate, because gossip really is the foundation of friendships and relationships.

Snapchat

Snapchat has always been weird. I’ve never really found the point of it. It annoyed me really. I couldn’t maintain a general perspective about the person I was talking to because I didn’t really know who I was talking to. Very easy to delete.

Zakkarie Montgomery-Cole says Instagram is one of the harder apps to delete. Picture: iStock

Instagram 

Instagram was a little harder to delete because of all the sexually attractive people you don’t know in person but are following. You don’t want to let the hot six pack abs go. You love them. You need them. Turns out you don’t. The really hot ones you remember and can search up on the internet at any time.

Facebook

Facebook has got to be the hardest account to delete. After deleting, you usually end up back on it again, as I did.

However, the trick with Facebook is that once you’ve deleted the first account, people stop accepting friend requests from new accounts.

Most people who have a lot of friends on Facebook are the people who added them when social media was still new and exciting.

After the excitement died, and when all the scammers and spammers and fake people started appearing, people stopped easily accepting Facebook friends.

The easiest way to delete Facebook is to do the whole thing manually with the activity log. It is honestly so much fun.

You pick an action you want to focus on such a “likes” and then the activity log shows you every single thing you’ve ever liked or reacted to during the however many years you’ve been on the platform, and then you delete and remove every reaction from every single thing you can.

Zakkarie Montgomery-Cole found it hard to stay plugged out of Facebook. Picture: AFP

It’s a very empowering task. Likes and reactions on social media are a currency. It’s money. And when you take that like back from that “friend”, you’re taking your money back. You’re taking your social power back. You’re saying, you didn’t like me back so I’m taking my like back. It’s so liberating, just thinking about how everyone’s reaction scores are secretly decreasing as you delete and remove them.

Then once you’ve manually reviewed (you do tend to look at things you once liked and go, huh so I wasted three years of my life being brainwashed by Yeah The Bois Fan Page) and deleted every single thing you’ve ever liked, you start deleting the comments and that’s even more fun.

You start deleting your comments and the great thing about deleting comments is that your comment is generally important to the rest of the comments so when you take your comment away, the rest of the comments look stupid and dumb and no one really understands how the conversations got to where they are now. Funny stuff.

Then you untag yourself from stuff and then you start deleting your friends and then once all of that is done, you realise that you don’t have a point in being on social media and you can finally close your account.

Manually deleting stuff is probably the most enjoyable part of deleting social media.

Pros

More organised. All my paperwork, documents and files have been organised systematically. Something that I never would have paid much attention to if I was endlessly scrolling through social media. I’ve got all my pay slips for the last six years printed and organised in a folder, some of them even have the document’s date of expiry (the date I can throw them away) written down.

More interested in news and current affairs.

No one seems to commit suicide (when on social media, suicides or news of suicides seemed to be all over the place, in the back of your mind) it’s weird how much suicide there isn’t without social media.

+ I don’t seem to care too much about what I look like or what I do as I don’t have a daily comparison.

+ Life is generally more peaceful. You don’t notice how chaotic and loud social media is until you don’t have it. It’s like everyone is screaming at each other on there.

Zakkarie Montgomery-Cole says there are more pros than cons after deleting social media. Picture: Natasha Emeck

+ I don’t have this crazy need to take pictures of myself. I can’t remember the last time I took a selfie.

+ Likes and reactions no longer matter to me. They used to be a highly valued currency to me, until I realised that I couldn’t actually buy anything with it.

+ I don’t have any creeps messaging me. I used to have so many old gay men personally messaging me for things, telling me to come on a holiday with them, telling me to come out and party at the clubs. There is none of that in real life.

+ My relationships have more closure. On social media, you have all these “friends” that are still a part of your life despite you not having talked to them for years. When you delete social media, you close the chapter on that friendship, something that is technically long overdue.

At first, it’s quite sad letting go of all these friendships but after a while you look back and everything feels more complete. They’re in the past, where they belong. Like, they were high school friends. High school was over a long time ago. Letting them go feels great.

Zakkarie Montgomery-Cole has been off social media since 2020, despite one relapse.

Cons:

+ I actually don’t talk to any of my “friends” from my social media accounts anymore.

At the start I traded phone numbers with a few people but people are strangely incompetent at replying to text messages. People just stop responding. I think it’s because text messages don’t necessarily tell you when the other person has read your messages.

Or maybe it’s because you give one person too much time and they’re not comfortable with that. After a while I deleted their numbers and changed my own phone number. No one has messaged me since.

The friends I would like to talk to, I have no idea how to contact them or where to find them … Like, do they still work at that pub?

+ Once you’ve deleted Facebook the first time, and can’t restore your account to its former glory the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh time, you end up deleting it for good.

We are calling on the federal government to raise the age limit at which children can access social media to 16 as part of a national campaign, Let Them Be Kids, to stop the scourge of social media.

Let Them Be Kids: SIGN THE PETITION

Originally published as Zakkarie Montgomery-Cole reveals why he deleted his social media accounts