At the start of January 2022, I decided to have a somewhat permanent break from social media.
I didn't announce it nor did I particularly plan it ahead of time - it was a combination of the lingering effects of some stressful events at the end of 2021 to top off what had not been a vintage year anyway; and despair at what felt like a maelstrom of anger and fear everywhere I looked online around the time of the omicron surge in Australia. For my mental health, I knew something needed to change.
I was also increasingly dissatisfied with how many hours I knew I was losing to basically what is the psyche's equivalent of the pokies.
Don’t get me wrong, I think there are some great aspects to social media. It’s not a bad thing in itself. But what many of us don’t appreciate is that the companies who own the platforms (Facebook/Meta/Zuckerverse, etc) designed them deliberately to be as addictive as possible. Therefore, trying to get some semblance of balance in your usage of social media is so much harder than you’d think.
So, I disappeared. Cold turkey.
Has anyone noticed? I have no idea! But what I have noticed is an incredible difference in my mental health, my stress levels, my equilibrium, my energy, and my creativity. It might be a combination of other changes I’ve made (more about those later) but I can’t recall ever feeling this clear-headed in my entire adult life.
Connection with others is what fuels me. And I value the connections I’ve made on social media over the years very much. But many of them have been taken offline - I now have two penpals who live in Melbourne, both of whom I follow on socials, but during the lockdowns we started writing letters to each other, which we’ve continued. As a result I know far more about what is really going on in their lives than what they choose to share publicly on their grids - and likewise they know far more about what’s really going on with me. That is real connection. That is what I want more of.
The video below (please forgive the portrait mode it was shot in, I know it should be landscape!) is a little stream-of-consciousness ramble I recorded three weeks into my break. Another month has passed since I recorded this and I still feel no real need to return. I am missing the connection and interaction with others but I know with a bit of effort this can be sourced elsewhere. And I think more and more people are catching on. Perhaps blogging is about to have a big renaissance.
Stay tuned. This is an interesting, and exciting, experiment.
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Hello everyone! It’s the thirty-first of January, which means I have been off social media for three weeks today. And, as I've alluded to in previous videos, I've been so surprised by the fact that I haven't missed it at all.
I feel calmer, I feel less panicked, I feel less anxiety, I don't feel as angry or tense or on edge. I don't feel like my attention or focus is compromised. I feel clearer in the head and more alert. I've been able to choose where my energy goes and that's incredibly empowering.
I really thought that I had a handle on my social media habits. I really thought that I chose when I looked at these various platforms, that I chose the time of day or the period of time that I allowed myself to have a look but I really didn't appreciate how many hours each day I was clocking up, refreshing and losing time when there wasn't really anything new to see and, more to the point, there wasn't anything new for me to say or share! It was just very basic stuff that I'm not sure people are really all that interested in and it's not content I want to devote my precious time and creativity to. I want to use my creativity for my creative work and so to have this time back, this brain space back, feels like such a gift.
And it was a gift I was able to give myself with basically no effort. All I had to do was make the decision. It's amazing what a transformation it has been.
I didn't realise that the average social media user spends 2.5 hours a day on the various platforms – that’s 15-18 hours a week? That's a part time job! So when you think about it that way, that’s 15-18 hours a week that you could get a part time job, that you could use to learn an instrument, to train for a 10K, to write a novel, to build websites, to exercise, to start a garden, to spend time with your family - all of these things that we think we don't have the time to do, we actually do but it's making a choice to use your time consciously and to make conscious choices. That’s something that I have advocated publicly for a very long time, but it was always within the health and fitness context. I’m slowly appreciating that making conscious choices is something that effects every aspect of our lives - physical health, mental health, wellbeing, financial freedom, financial health, career, everything! We have far more choices than we think we do. We have more power than we think we do.
I guess as I've gotten older, my life is just more and more about wanting to live in integrity and really wanting to live my values. Having had this little time out to figure out what those values are and articulate them for myself and know deep within what I want to stand for and how I want to spend my time and the difference I want to make…if everyone could have this kind of epiphany, I wonder what kind of world we’d live in.
I'll leave it there for now. I don't know when I'm going to go back on these things. I don't know if I'll go back at all! We shall see. Thank you for listening.
Would you like to share your thoughts on this post with me? Please do - I’d love to hear from you!