A woman who stopped using all social media to seek out real connections shares how she did it

• Xandra Robinson-Burns quit social media last year, deleting Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
• She said she was tired of collecting followers and wanted to make more deliberate connections.
• While the decision isn't for anyone, she said people shouldn't feel pressured to stay online.

When Xandra Robinson-Burns first decided to go "off the grid" and cut social media out of her life, she started with an unusual choice: Goodreads, an app connecting book lovers to their friend's latest reads and reviews.

"It started with feeling like reading for fun wasn't fun anymore," she told Insider. "The social accountability and the star ratings and everything was just quantifying something that I did for fun in a way that made it feel like work."

This was 2018. Two years later, she'd go on to execute what she called a social media "exodus," deleting her Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn profiles and removing Instagram from her phone (the profile remains as a portfolio of her work, she said, but she doesn't check or update it).

The 30-year-old writer currently based in Edinburgh, Scotland, said she was at a virtual conference when she told a friend she couldn't wait until the event was over so she could take a vacation from social media. Hearing the longing in Robinson-Burns voice, the friend suggested, "Why don't you just do it now?"

The recently-released Facebook Papers, lead by whistleblower Frances Haugen, have revealed some startling truths about the social-media company, including leadership failing to put controls in place to combat hate speech and actively pursuing teens despite knowing the platforms' negative impact on their mental health.

Similar shocking details have come out about other social platforms in recent weeks, begging the question of whether social media is even worth having anymore. The Wall Street Journal reported last month that some teens have started developing tics after watching TikTok clips about Tourette syndrome. Internal Twitter data, meanwhile, revealed the platform amplified right-wing political content (it also revealed that the company failed to block some users targeting Meghan Markle and Prince Harry with harassment).

Robinson-Burns hadn't been exposed to any of this information when she left her online world behind in 2020. Rather, she was tired of the ads and peer pressure and "collecting" followers. She wanted to make real connections with people. When she told friends her plan, one offered to join in.

To keep track of their efforts and celebrate each other's exits, the two created a spreadsheet, jotting down when they'd successfully downloaded photos they wanted to keep (Robinson-Burns said she used Inkifi to turn her Instagram album into a physical album) or announced their leave on their profiles.

Taking their time was key: "I quit very slowly. I gave 30 days per platform to let people know I was going to leave," Robinson-Burns said. "So people who are close to me in my life know that I'm not there."

Soon the day came for Robinson-Burn's final post. She decided to quote Bilbo Baggins' speech at the beginning of "The Lord of the Rings" right before he disappears. "I wish to make an ANNOUNCEMENT. I regret to announce that - though, as I said, eleventy-one years is far too short a time to spend among you - this is the END. I am going. I am leaving NOW. GOOD-BYE!" she wrote.

"That was my last tweet. That was my last Facebook post," she said.

Her departure provoked a lot of conversation about her decision.

"People also just wanted to keep talking about, 'How are you doing now that you're off Instagram?' And I was like, 'I'm really not thinking about Instagram.'"

"I was really excited to talk about it at first," she added. "And then a few months down the line, I was tired of identifying myself as the person who quit social media."

Since unplugging, Robinson-Burns said she's focused on "deliberateness." She actively reaches out to people she wants to connect with. She spends more time digesting long-form content, like newsletters. She subscribed to a print newspaper. She even kept a Facebook group she ran going using Google Slides.

She admitted she's occasionally had the instinct to go online. "The irony I realized, three of my friends published books in the same month, and I wanted to go on and tweet and share the word," she said. "And I realized I couldn't tag them. Cause all three of them quit social media, too."

Her experience isn't for everyone, she noted. "If you genuinely love being on social media, then stay," she said. But for those feeling like it's a necessity or pressured to keep at it, she added, there are other ways.

When she announced her Facebook group was going to be closing and evolving off social media, she said she had 100% support from her community (the community, she estimated, was about 50- to 60-people large - it's now at about 25 participating members). "A few people said that was the only reason they were on Facebook and now they felt at peace that they could leave," she said. "Some members voiced their concern about maintaining the community element without the group but entrusted me to figure that out."

Everyone else, even those who chose to leave the program, "were still really nice about it," she added. "The whole point of it for me is to show that no, we don't need it. And in fact, here we are doing things differently over here and still having a great time."