I was an avid Snapchat user. The pique of curiosity you experience when someone sends you a picture or video. Constantly flipping through Snapchat stories as a boredom reliever. That dog filter that makes everyone look better/cuter because it obscures over 40 percent of your actual face. Yes, Snapchat was one app that I vowed always to have on my phone. An essential.

But, I have an old phone (Samsung Galaxy S4 released in 2013 — yes, I am due for an upgrade), which by today’s standards is very, very outdated. And as technology grows faster and faster, support for various, constantly updated apps decreases for older phones. And thus, when I noticed my battery life started draining from 90 to 40 percent in a matter of two hours on standby, and when my phone would freeze and grow concerningly hot, I realized that Snapchat was taking a serious toll on my old-man of a phone. It was then that I made the fateful decision to delete the app off my phone, and entered my Snapchat sabbatical.

Sabbatical is a funny word, which seems somewhat contradictory to what I had done. I deleted Snapchat out of necessity, not because I necessarily wanted to. My beloved Snapchat gone? No more pictures of blank walls with a text of “What did I say again?”? What was I supposed to do with all of my free time now that I wasn’t constantly sending pictures to people?

In the beginning, it felt strange. No longer was I constantly receiving picture and video messages, gone were the notifications. I no longer had to always try to make myself look “decent” when sending selfies in response to others. My social media life had immediately become quite quiet.

And yet, once I deleted Snapchat, my productivity levels instantly shot up. I could finally work undisturbed for long periods at a time, without the temptation to check my phone for Snapchat notifications, because I no longer had the app. Before, my workflow was always interrupted and broken due to opening the app; first, I had to open all my Snapchats, respond to the ones that I deemed important, scroll through various stories that had been posted, and then go back and respond to other pictures once I came up with more witty responses. And then finally, if I was also doing something particularly riveting (e.g. sitting alone in the library, binge eating snacks in my room), I would take another few minutes to post it to my Snapchat story. This process would always take at least ten minutes. And then after it was over, I would have to go back to whatever I was doing, and take the time to recollect my thoughts and refocus again. Yes, my Snapchat sabbatical caused me to be genuinely productive (let me stress, productive!!). Most of my grades are thanking me right now, and that is beautiful thing.

There was also no more need to validate myself on social media. A large part of the reason why I would regularly use Snapchat was to post on my Snapchat story, the feature where pictures would remain for 24 hours for all your friends to see. I’ll admit, everything posted on my Snapchat story had some consideration behind it. You post Snapchat stories specifically with an audience in mind. Part of the reason why I would post was to show off what I was doing, and to try to show to the world, “Hey, look at me doing cool stuff!” or “I’m not doing exciting stuff but look at how studious I am!” or “Look at my friends and what fun stuff we are doing!”. I posted with the subtle intention of trying to make others feel envious, to show off, to make people approve of and even want what I had, where I was, what I was experiencing. It was almost as if I had to post in order to truly validate how I felt about what I was doing, that day in the city or a meal with friends isn’t truly worthwhile unless it is shared and seen by everyone. It’s hard to explain, but after deleting Snapchat, the pressure disappeared. I no longer had to pause in the middle of what I was doing to take a picture for the sole purpose of showing people. There was no one online that I was trying to impress anymore, no one that I was trying to puff myself up before, no one to receive validation from, and that in itself was very freeing.

Tying in very closely with my previous point, deleting Snapchat literally equals no more FOMO ("Fear Of Missing Out"). This is a problem that everyone struggles with from time to time, even if they don’t admit it. How could you experience FOMO if you don’t even know what you’re missing out on? As time went on, I stopped wondering about what other people were up to. Before, I would sit in my room at at my desk behind a text-filled computer screen and compare how boring, and to an extent, how unsatisfying my life was to someone who was always going out on late night trips to LA. Now, I could care less about what people are up to, mostly because I don’t know what they are up to. As the adage goes, ignorance is bliss, and my Snapchat sabbattical has definitely brought some blissful ignorance.

Of course, my Snapchat sabbatical, although it greatly helped my phone’s battery life as intended, had its drawbacks. Upon the first few days of deleting the app, I impulsively redownloaded it again, just because I wanted to see what I was missing out on, and wanted again to experience the satisfying feeling of tapping a little red or purple square. It was then that I saw how much had happened in the short time I was gone. Among all the notifications I had received from other people, the unopened Snapchat stories were in a glaring steady stream. After cleaning up my Snapchat, I deleted it again. And then a week later, I repeated this.

I did realize, setting aside feelings of FOMO, that without Snapchat, I definitely out of the loop. I was no longer active and in communication with my some of my real life friends on Snapchat, people that I had maintained long streaks with, people that were my “best friends” (har har). For some of my friends, Snapchat was the only system that we would both use to stay in contact with each other, and not responding to their Snapchats was like letting an online conversation, and essentially a friendship, grow old and stale. People would throw around the phrase, “Oh yeah, I saw it on Snapchat” and talk about something I didn’t know about. There were things that had happened that I wouldn’t know about if I didn’t have Snapchat. And I didn’t have it of course, which left me confused and left out amongst my friends’ shared stories and inside jokes.

This whole dilemma I faced is what is referred to as Hobson’s choice, that you can “take it or leave it.” Hobson’s choice, recently referenced in my human computer interaction and design class, is when one is working with a system, that there is not a pure and perfect market, and that there are not always alternatives. In this case, there isn’t a perfect substitute for Snapchat. I either had to take Snapchat altogether for what it was or I had to not use it at all. There was ultimately a choice I had to make for myself: continue to have Snapchat, let it distract me, let it kill my phone’s battery, or to not have it and not stay in contact with my friends in that way, and to not know most accurately what was going on in their daily lives.

...

I’ve haven’t had Snapchat on my phone for almost two months now. Ever since I had had Snapchat since my junior year of high school, it has been a constant, uninterrupted exchange of pictures, videos, and stories for almost three years straight. I thought that deleting it would to an extent, leave me unfulfilled, but deleting it actually helped me to see how much of a role I had allowed social media to play in my life, how I derived much of my happiness and validation from it itself. How concerned I used to be over the “perfect image,” both literally and of myself.

Sure, from time to time I do miss it, and I think Snapchat is a nice app to communicate with friends in a fun and unique way. But, not having Snapchat is also equally as rewarding in different ways that had never occurred to me in thought before, and that is what my sabbatical has taught me. So, when will I done with my sabbatical? I used to tell people when I first deleted my Snapchat that I would get it again the moment I got a new phone. So far, I haven’t gotten a new phone yet, but when I do, I’m not completely sure if Snapchat will make it into one of my essentials, and that’s perfectly fine with me. I’ll need to consult Hobson again on that one, and revisit that same choice that I will always have.