On Sunday afternoon (10/17/21), a little after 4pm as the sun tried to break through the clouds, I consciously uncoupled from social media. I didn’t go so far as to delete my accounts (I didn’t even deactivate them), but I did remove them from my phone’s home screen…. which is a little like putting them in a lock box. If I really want to, I can open the lock box and access them. What I hope to do, is pay attention to what I’m thinking and feeling when I want to access the lock box. I hope to see how I restructure my time (especially all of those little moments) in the absence of mindless scrolling.
The first thing I noticed as I was exploring my options for “quitting” was that I was inclined to go almost all-in. I felt that if I was going to do this, I wanted something more than just removing them from my home screen. I wanted my profiles to disappear – maybe not be deleted, but go dark. This is the strange thing about social media and the attention-seeking economy it creates. Even in quitting, I wanted people to notice. If I’m a tree and I’m going to fall in a forest, I want someone to hear it. Thinking through this, it became difficult, by which I mean humbling, to imagine how I appear (or don’t) in other people’s feeds. I was forced to recognize that I seldom think about the people I don’t see. Social media trains us to pay attention to what it shows us, and how others react to our engagement. For me, this has the effect of feeling like I almost know someone, or am almost having a conversation with them. It also trains me to not think about the 200 connections that I never see and with whom I never converse. The humbling part is knowing that unless you engage, unless you tell people you’re leaving, unless you make a spectacle of your departure, chances are, nobody will notice.
Along those same lines, it’s forced me to recognize, or acknowledge, that aside from a few family members and my co-workers, I have very few regular, social interactions with people. I am on a group text with with 10 other friends, but I seldom participate. I occasionally post something to Facebook, but it’s pretty infrequent (I’d look up how often, but I’ve removed the app from my phone). I guess the point I’m getting at, is the sobering truth that were I to go missing, it might be a week or so before anyone started looking. I’m not sure how I feel about that. It is the life I’ve built – though not intentionally. I suspect, participating in social media, even in a limited fashion, has masked this…. deficit? hole? aspect? of my life. It has, to some degree, created the illusion that I’m connected to people on a daily basis because I was reading about them and their lives on a daily basis. Not doing so only deprives me of the sense of connection.
Last night (10/18/21) I attended a reception for a local business man – it was a work thing, an event where I felt I needed to be present (I’m still new to most of the community). I got home a little before 10 pm. It was a long day that started with an in-person meeting at 9 am – which meant leaving the house by 8. I was tired when I got home. The dog was bonkers. I hired someone to feed him and walk him, but he had been home all day by himself and needed lots of attention. I was too tired to read or write or do much of anything…. That’s when I found myself missing social media. I probably picked my phone up a half-dozen times only to find that the apps I would usually turn to weren’t there. I wanted something mindless, something mildly informative. I felt a bit disconnected. All I could really do was sit with that feeling. I played with the dog some more and went to bed.
Today (10/19/21) will be a more interesting challenge. I’ll first apologize for switching tenses. Sometimes, like right now, I am writing more in the moment, and other times I’m writing about the recent past. I’m adding dates in because I want to chronicle some of the break-up. My typical breakfast routine, is make coffee, feed dog, make waffles, read news, scroll social media (a different type of read news). I’m filling the social media hole with writing this, but that won’t always be the case. At least twice I’ve picked my phone up out of habit. My ummm moments between paragraphs are usually filled by pausing and mindlessly scrolling. Without the apps to check, I have to sit through the ummm moments, stare at the screen.
Last night (10/19/21), my experiences were similar to the other days and nights. I found myself a little fidgety and not knowing what to do with myself. I wasn’t in the mood to read or write, and I don’t watch TV. I’ve mentioned several times on this blog that I’ve wasted nights with scrolling. In the absence of that, I struggled to fill my time and went to bed early.
This morning (10/20/21), felt a lot like yesterday morning. My “news” intake cut short, because I’ve limited my sources. I think I’m slowly adjusting and not picking up my phone quite as much. Mood-wise, I suspect I feel a little more anxious, but I don’t feel any happier and conversely I don’t entirely miss social media. I’m going to pause the daily mental/emotional check-ins (I’m already bored with them) and hit publish. Overall, I’d characterize the last few days as a low-grade sense of withdrawal.
They say it takes thirty days to establish a new habit. I may or may not stick it out that long – haven’t decided yet. My goal, if I have one, is to re-establish some boundaries with myself – to examine the role social media plays in my day to day life. While my initial thoughts are that I won’t miss it all that much (I gave up TV a few years ago and don’t miss it at all), I suspect this is something slightly different. TV doesn’t make you feel connected to people you know, TV is much more passive. I’ll follow this up with another post in a week or two or three. As a final thought, I have to concede the irony that maybe even writing about it here, is my equivalent of letting the world know that I’m going to disappear from social media for a bit – the “goodbye for now” post (the theatrics) that I refused to make on social media.