My Toxic Relationship with Social Media

Irtiza Hafiz
5 min readAug 30, 2022
Photo by Merakist on Unsplash

Over the years, I have used various social media apps on my phone — Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp, Instagram, etc.

I moved to the US from Bangladesh in 2015. Prior to that, everyone in my life used either Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp. That meant, in order to stay in touch with my friends and family, I had to keep my Facebook account no matter what.

As I started living in the US, away from friends and family, I started developing a toxic relationship with these social media apps.

How It All Started…

During the first couple of months in the US, I used to feel very lonely.

I never really stayed so far from friends and family, so it was difficult for me. To make matters worse, I am an introvert, so it definitely wasn’t easy to make new friends when I was just 18 in a totally new country thousands of miles away from Bangladesh.

I was also dating someone from Bangladesh during that time.

It felt comfortable talking to them. Finding new friends or meeting new people was uncomfortable. Every time I tried, I kept going back to my comfort zone the next day.

As days went by, the need to connect with people back in Bangladesh grew stronger and stronger.

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Irtiza Hafiz

Engineering manager who writes about software development and productivity https://irtizahafiz.com