“I deleted my Snapchat,” I told my sister one afternoon after finally mustering up some conviction and nerve to cut the app from my life for good. “It's been a long time coming.”

My sister was a little saddened by this news. She used to frequently send me snaps, and she was even the reason I decided to re-activate my account in the first place. Snapchat and I have had an on/off relationship for about two years, but when my sister urged me to come back to it, I couldn't say no. I'll give Snapchat a real try this time, I told myself. I'll stick it through.

And I did. I kept my Snapchat account for a good handful of months (which surpassed my previous two week record), receiving snaps from my sister and others, viewing my friends’ stories, and even sending an occasional snap myself. But the negative influence Snapchat was having on my behavior became increasingly evident.

I began to view the experiences around me not as moments to live and enjoy, but as potential opportunities to send a snap. Maybe it was because I was so bad at Snapchat that I never seized those Snapchat opportunities, purely because I wasn't quick enough to snap it. But I started to have thoughts that said, “Oh I should've snapped that!” Or “Should I snap this moment?” Or “What can I snap to my sister right now?” The more I received snaps from my friends, the more it seemed I should up my Snapchat game. Plus, I wanted to keep in touch, and if Snapchat provided a means to do that, why shouldn't I get better at it?

But I slowly began to realize that Snapchat wasn't fostering connection with friends, it was isolating it. Snapchat is one of the most intimate forms of social media. We can receive minute by minute updates about the smallest details of our friends’ lives. I've received snaps of the meals they ate that day, videos from parties they went to, and selfie after selfie of them being bored. But the more intimate the snap, the farther I felt from my friends. It was almost as though I was intruding on something I shouldn't be a part of, which felt disconnected. This was particularly true when receiving mass snaps that were clearly sent to multiple people, or stories that were available for all friends to view. But neither did these up-close-and-personal messages encourage conversation. I began to know about my friends’ lives and whereabouts without even needing to have any interaction with them.

It even began to seem that Snapchat made it too easy to share information centered on me. For the most part, when using outlets like Facebook or even Instagram, you should have something noteworthy to share, but for Snapchat, anything is fair game. You don't need to have anything worth sharing in order to share it. Take a picture of a cup if you'd like, that'll do just fine. Add a brief, sentence-long reflection on the cup’s color and you're ready to share! No cup around? No need to fear, just snap a selfie and add some fun dog ears with the filter application, that's always a great go-to. Everybody loves the puppy filter. But do my friends really want to know what I'm drinking at this very moment or the exact color of my cup? Do my friends really want to see another selfie of me with puppy ears? Do my friends really want to know about the excruciatingly unimportant details of my life? And is it healthy to assume that they do? The longer I used Snapchat, the more I had to force myself to answer these questions. When the smallest and most random moments and things in your day are socially acceptable to share, everything seems more “important” than it actually is. When we don't have to consider the quality, relevance, or necessity of what we post, maybe we start to lose sight of what really matters and what's really important—not us, but the world and people around us.

Don't get me wrong, Snapchat does have some great uses. I’m sure for some people, it is a fun and real way to connect with others, and I also know that a lot of people do put creativity into their snaps. I've seen some pretty great ones, like this snap of a squirrel eating pizza (a worthy share indeed).

But reflecting upon the ways your environment is affecting you is always a good practice. My environment (Snapchat) was encouraging behavior that was not beneficial to myself or to those around me. Thus, my run with Snapchat has come to a definite end, and I won't be going back this time. I never liked the puppy filter anyway.