These days it seems the only thing people like more than social media is talking about how much they hate social media.
On the one hand, it’s nice to keep up with long, lost friends you haven’t stayed in regular contact with otherwise. But then it means you also have to see their warped political opinions or phony pictures where they try to fool you about how awesome their perfect lives are. It can be nauseating, or exhausting or even downright toxic for some users.
Some days all you want to do is delete those apps off your phone and make it all disappear. If this is one of those days, there’s a company that wants to pay you to do just that.
“We are going to be paying one person $2,500 to quit social media for a month,” said Bailey Caldwell, a digital PR specialist for All Home Connections, which is an online retailer.
She’s part of a team that studies and reports on internet trends. The study will last 25 days, and the first five of them you’ll still surf your Facebook or Twitter pages like you would any other day. You’ll just have to document your mood as you do it.
“Then after the first five days they’ll completely delete every single social media app off their phone, their tablet, their computers, everything,” said Caldwell.
Over the course of those last 20 days, participants will still document and track their moods without social media in their lives, for better or worse.
With the way the world is, and social media in particular, these days it seems like it’s been more worse than better.
“We want people to take a break, take a step back, and encourage them to be more aware of how they’re using it and how much they’re using it,” said Caldwell.
That means instead of mindlessly scrolling through apps just to waste time, she said she hopes people will be more purposeful, “to either see what their friends or doing, or to share what they’re doing or to look up a recipe.”
So far over 35,000 people have filled out the form to apply for the study. Only one will be chosen. The deadline to apply is Monday at noon.
Even if it’s not you, “at the end of the day it doesn’t hurt to quit for a month anyway. I highly suggest it,” said Caldwell, who said she herself took a social media hiatus last year.
“I found myself being addicted to my phone in general and I just deleted all of the apps off my phone for a couple of months and it made me feel so much better when I got back on it,” Caldwell said.
And in the current climate, she admitted “people want to do it anyway.”
But, someone will get paid for it.
