I’ve quit social media this year. I’m liking the me that has emerged after the dust and anxiety settled and I no longer expose myself to all the things. I think I’ll make it permanent.
I haven’t deleted my account or disabled them or anything, but one day I woke up and said enough and just stopped logging in. I wasn’t loving the stress, the addiction to meaningless updates, and just feeling empty. What I hated the most was this new insatiable need to pass the time by peering into everyone’s lives and seeing what they had going on. I was someone impatient and was desperate to fill the gaps in my day which blocked me from thinking introspectively. Plus I was finding myself comparing my life constantly, even though I wasn’t really prone to that behavior before these apps came into popularity. Suddenly all my competitive instincts were pointed inward and I was finding more and more ways I was falling short of what I saw online. So I stopped.
When I was in the process of quitting I definitely felt withdrawals and even phantom phone notifications, all of which further motivated me that this was the right thing to do. Plus, did you know that when you quit social media, the company notifications somehow dials up their efforts to get you back by like 1000% and suddenly you are bombarded by emails, texts, and notifications (even when you’e explicitly unchecked all those things!) to come back.
Seeing the desperate retention emails from this company made me understand how much this company needed my content, and that need matched my own need for incessant small doses of external validation for almost every fucking everything ever. What’s worse, all that effort! Think about all the time spent on photos, money spent on phones, time that you cannot get back scrolling endlessly. Enough. I’m getting too tired, too old to do it all. All the damn effort to artfully curate a grid on a platform that I have no say in, even though it’s touted as this exceptional place to be yourself and share with others. No thank you. I can share smaller and spend my time creating whatever I want here on my blog. I’m wondering why I ever needed more than this. Why did I ever need an audience? Why does everyone today need an audience?
Enter 2020. Life is…. different now! I am thinking I have this great opportunity to change who I am fundamentally. Like top down, bottom up, inside out different. There’s a sense of helplessness this year and maybe I’m trying to find a way to turn this fucking frown upside down and come out of this year with something positive. I think it’s cool that if I do get to see folks again, like before, even they won’t even notice a change because whether they like it or not they’ve probably changed too. So the idea of having the upper hand on this sea change and seizing the opportunity versus letting it change me is pretty exciting.
Does it drill down to control? Possibly. But it’s more about what the long game will be when people like me graduate from their roaring 20s to the more serious 30s and the lovely 40s and beyond. Life is now and I am curating it heavily. I am deleting apps that dilute my effort, my time, and my limited human attention. Put another way, will I still want to photograph and edit every aspect of my life for an audience that I don’t really know for a company that uses my content to hook others to a life of insecurity, anxiety, and jealousy? I am thinking no. If I’m already having doubts about this one aspect of my life that is pretty comparable to other fun things in excess (drinking, partying, gambling, etc.) then it’s probably best to home in on myself and work on being calm, confident, and happy.And ok, maybe it’s not that serious—but you know what is? The gut feeling that this was something I had to quit in order to feel better. And now that I’ve quit, I do feel better. So what did I have to lose anyway. A couple thousand “followers”?
With that said, these days I have been processing the news with my loved ones in pretty old school ways; sharing text messages and phone calls, all of which are happening more frequently. It’s concentrated and real. I text my people and they reciprocate. It’s a smaller, quieter social life and it’s lovely.
I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t curious to see how people on Instagram (mostly the memes) are responding to the stress of not knowing the results of the election and the sky rocketing Covid cases, but I’m sticking to my decision to own where my attention goes — so here I am.