There’s a strange and quiet cost to leaving social media that nobody really talks about. Nobody really mocks you for stepping back. Instead, it’s much, much smaller than that. A joke goes around the group chat, and suddenly you don’t get it, not because you weren’t paying attention, but because you haven’t seen the thing online that everyone else has seen. There’s now a meme, a clip, a reference that has quietly become common knowledge to everyone still scrolling. Nobody is actively excluding you; you are just no longer in the know. You’ve stopped standing in the place where the group’s shared reality is being built.