My relationship with the internet started before it became something we carried everywhere.
Around 2006 or 2007, personal internet access was still uncommon in Bangladesh. We did not have internet at home. If you wanted to go online, you often went to a cyber cafe, paid by the hour, used a shared computer, and left.
Around that time, while visiting Dhaka, I met Jony uncle.
After I returned to Jhalokati, he introduced me to Yahoo Mail so that we could stay in touch.
That was my beginning with the internet.
Someone was in Dhaka. I was in Jhalokati. Yet we could write to each other through a computer.
The internet, to me, started as connection.
Growing Up With the Internet
Around 2007 or 2008, I started using Facebook.
Internet access was still limited. Sometimes it meant a cyber cafe, sometimes basic mobile internet. Around 2008 or 2009, we bought our first computer, and gradually the internet became part of everyday life.
Then I moved to Dhaka.
Around 2009–2011, while studying in college, I was introduced to programming through a computer studies subject.
It was very basic programming in BASIC.
But I found it fascinating.
Until then, a computer was mostly something I used.
Programming showed me that I could tell the computer what to do.
A little later, around 2011 and 2012, I became interested in hacking and cybersecurity.
I learned about communities such as Bangladesh Black Hat Hackers, Bangladesh Cyber Army, and 3xpire Cyber Army. It was also the period when the killing of Felani Khatun at the Bangladesh–India border had created enormous anger in Bangladesh, including confrontations between online communities from both countries.
I got to know some members of Bangladesh Black Hat Hackers and 3xpire Cyber Army.
Through that world, one idea stayed with me:
If I wanted to become better at hacking, I needed to understand programming.
It sounds funny when I think about it today, but that curiosity changed the direction of my life.
I convinced my mother that I wanted to study Computer Science.
Computer Science was not quite the glamorous career choice then that it can appear to be today. I was simply fascinated by computers, programming, networks, security, and the internet.
In late 2012 or early 2013, I joined a private university in Dhaka to study Computer Science.
From that point, computers and the internet became part of my everyday life.
Eventually, they became my career.
Then Facebook Became Part of Life
Naturally, my Facebook life grew with my real life.
University friends became Facebook friends.
Colleagues became Facebook friends.
People I met through other people became Facebook friends.
Then came jobs, achievements, travels, photographs, birthdays, and different stages of life.
Post an achievement and people congratulate you.
Share a happy photograph and people react.
Change jobs and people clap.
Travel somewhere and people comment.
Over time, hundreds of people become your "friends."
And when you keep seeing reactions, comments, birthday wishes, and congratulations, it starts to feel like hundreds of people are somehow participating in your life.
For years, I never questioned that.
Then one question started bothering me:
Are these people actually thinking about me, or am I simply appearing in front of them?
So I Disappeared
I decided to experiment.
I deactivated Facebook.
I deactivated Instagram.
I kept Messenger because it was still useful for communicating with family and people close to me.
Then I disappeared from everyone's feed.
And something interesting happened.
Nothing.
I had hundreds of Facebook friends.
There had been regular likes, comments, reactions, congratulations, and birthday wishes.
But after I disappeared, hardly anyone contacted me asking what happened.
No wave of messages.
No particular curiosity about why I was no longer there.
It almost felt as if I had never existed.
At first, the easy conclusion would be:
Maybe these people never cared.
But I don't think that is entirely fair.
Many of them are good people. If I met them tomorrow, we might happily sit down, have coffee, and talk for an hour.
The problem wasn't necessarily the people.
The problem was how I had interpreted the interaction.
"I Saw You" Is Not "I Thought of You"
When I posted something, Facebook placed me directly in front of people.
They didn't have to remember me.
They didn't have to search for me.
They didn't have to decide to contact me.
They were scrolling.
And there I was.
A photograph.
A promotion.
A birthday notification.
A trip.
The platform had already done almost all the work.
The remaining effort was tiny:
Like.
React.
Comment.
Congratulations.
Happy birthday.
Keep scrolling.Those interactions were real.
But I had assigned more meaning to them than perhaps they deserved.
There is a significant difference between:
I saw you.
and
I thought of you.
Social media is extremely good at creating the first.
For a long time, I had confused some of it with the second.
That was the first part of the social media illusion for me.
We See Moments and Imagine Lives
The same illusion exists in how we see other people's lives.
Someone posts from Switzerland.
Someone gets promoted.
Someone gets married.
Someone buys a house.
Someone has dinner somewhere beautiful.
Someone travels with family.
None of those moments need to be fake.
The trip happened.
The promotion happened.
The smile might have been completely genuine.
But a photograph is still only a moment.
We don't know what happened before it.
We don't know what happened after it.
We don't know the financial pressure, loneliness, family problems, uncertainty, grief, arguments, or responsibilities outside the frame.
Yet our brain fills in the missing pieces.
We look at someone else's selected moments and imagine an entire life.
Then we compare that imagined life with our own.
That comparison is fundamentally unfair.
I know everything about myself.
My doubts.
My mistakes.
My responsibilities.
My difficult days.
The things I worry about.
The people I miss.
Then I compare all of that with someone else's photograph.
Of course their life looks cleaner.
I have access to all of my unfinished chapters.
I only see the pages of theirs they decided to publish.
I Was Part of It Too
It would be easy to write this as if everyone else was creating an illusion and I was only observing it.
That would not be honest.
I did the same thing.
I shared achievements.
I shared travel.
I shared photographs.
I shared good moments.
Those moments were real.
But they were still only moments.
Someone might see photographs of me travelling through Europe and imagine a life very different from the one I was actually living around those photographs.
They don't see the work.
The responsibilities.
The paperwork.
The uncertainty.
The loneliness.
The ordinary days before and after.
A person can stand somewhere incredibly beautiful while still carrying something heavy inside.
Both things can be true at the same time.
A photograph simply cannot show both.
Too Much Information, Too Little Value
There was another reason I gradually stopped enjoying social media.
My head was becoming crowded.
Facebook and Instagram exposed me to an enormous amount of information every day.
Some of it was useful.
A lot of it wasn't.
Someone I barely knew had an argument.
An influencer got married.
Then divorced.
Then married again.
Someone said something controversial.
Someone else responded.
A celebrity did something stupid.
People became angry.
Three days later, everyone moved on to something else.
None of it had anything to do with my life.
Yet somehow, I knew about it.
That is what started bothering me.
Social media doesn't only consume time.
It consumes mental space.
You see something for ten seconds.
Then you think about it.
Maybe it annoys you.
Maybe you read the comments.
Maybe you form an opinion.
Maybe you tell someone else.
Something that had absolutely nothing to do with your life has now occupied part of your mind.
Multiply that by hundreds of posts.
At some point, I started asking:
Why do I need to know all of this?
I don't need to know which influencer got married for the second or third time.
I don't need to know what two strangers are arguing about.
I don't need an opinion about every controversy.
I don't need to know what someone I haven't spoken to in ten years ate for dinner.
Most of these things don't help me with my family, my work, my relationships, my goals, or my peace.
So why was I carrying them around?
The Value of Not Knowing
Something changed after I stopped regularly using social media.
My head became quieter.
I knew less nonsense.
And I liked it.
I could focus more on my work.
I could think about my own projects.
I could spend more attention on family.
I could read something because I deliberately wanted to read it instead of because an algorithm placed it in front of me.
And I discovered that there is value in saying:
I don't know anything about that.
There is information I need to know.
There is information I want to know.
And then there is information that reaches me only because an algorithm believes it can keep me on a screen for another few seconds.
Those are not the same thing.
If something genuinely important happens, I usually find out.
Someone tells me.
I read about it intentionally.
It reaches me through family, friends, work, or sources I deliberately choose.
What disappeared were mostly the things that didn't matter.
I don't miss them.
A Quieter Internet
I haven't rejected the internet.
That would be impossible, and it would also ignore how much the internet has given me.
It introduced me to communication.
Programming.
Cybersecurity.
Knowledge.
Communities.
Eventually, a career.
I still spend a large part of my life online.
I build software.
I read.
I learn.
I write.
I take photographs.
And I publish things here.
But this website feels different to me.
I can write something because I wanted to write it.
You can read it because you deliberately came here.
There is no endless feed underneath this article trying to keep you scrolling.
There doesn't need to be an audience for every moment of my life.
I prefer that relationship with the internet.
The Social Media Illusion
I don't think Facebook or Instagram are inherently bad.
I don't think people using them are doing anything wrong.
And I certainly don't think deleting social media makes someone more enlightened than everyone else.
This is simply what I learned from my own experience.
For me, social media created several illusions.
It made visibility feel like significance.
It made interaction feel like connection.
It made fragments look like complete lives.
It made information feel valuable simply because it was available.
And it made constant consumption feel normal.
My world became slightly smaller after leaving.
I know less about what hundreds of acquaintances are doing.
I miss internet controversies.
I probably miss jokes everyone else has already seen.
I don't know which influencer is getting married this week.
And I am perfectly fine with that.
Because while my informational world became smaller, my actual world became more visible.
My family.
My work.
The people who actually contact me.
The things I want to build.
The books I want to read.
The places I am physically standing in.
My own thoughts.
My own life.
The internet once taught me how large the world could be.
Stepping away from social media taught me something equally important:
Having access to the entire world does not mean I need to carry the entire world inside my head.
Perhaps that is what the social media illusion ultimately was for me.
Not that everything there was fake.
But that I had started confusing seeing people with knowing them, interaction with connection, information with value, and moments with lives.
These days, I would rather know a little less about everyone else and be a little more present in my own.