quitting social media: a video diary

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Not sure what I’m on about? Read this post.

So, as you know, at the start of January 2022, I decided to have a hiatus from social media. It has now been four months.

And you know what? I think I’m going to stay away, certainly for the foreseeable future.

I miss it sometimes, but I don’t miss it enough. I prefer life this way. Quieter, more reflective, less performative. More time to write and blog, more time to think. I’m learning French. I’m sewing. I’m exercising more and reading more. Despite a few destabilising events of late, I still feel mentally strong and calmer than I can ever remember being in my adult life. If anything, being away from social media has helped me cope better with some recent events.

I miss connecting with people but, on reflection, I don’t know how much of it was true connection. Several people who I thought would notice my lack of activity have not. But I’ve been very humbled by the people who have reached out and let me know they’re enjoying the fact I’ve been blogging regularly again.

Admittedly, I occasionally have moments where my busy-body gene goes into overdrive and I feel a huge compulsion to just KNOW WHAT EVERYONE IS UP TO but somehow (perhaps thanks to a daily meditation practice) I’ve managed to observe myself in these moments and become very curious about why.

Why do I need to see what people are up to? Is it healthy/helpful/necessary to know so much about other peoples’ lives, often people we have never even met? We know everything online is curated and edited to varying degrees, and that we're only seeing what people want us to see. With that in mind, is any of it real? And if the answer to that question is no, then why do we allow these platforms to drain our time, creative energy and self-esteem?

Frankly, I feel like a total rebel to have broken away! 

The video below is just a mish-mash of some video diaries I made in January and February, only a few days, weeks and then a month or so into my hiatus. I think you can even see the difference in me physically, and not just because I’d had a haircut by the last video! And don’t worry, I’ll be doing my video diaries in landscape mode from now on (cringe)!

• VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

  Day 8, 18 January 2022

  How does one do these things – vlogs? I'm much better at writing than I am saying what's on my mind and being articulate in the moment I think. However, this is day 8 of no social media for me. I feel so much calmer than I have for a very very long time. I feel like it's really nice that I don't know what other people are doing and they don't know what I'm doing! I feel free in a bizarre kind of way. I'm free in a way that I actually always have been, I just chose not to pay attention to that fact.

  Day 20, 30 January 2022

  Hello everyone. It's Sunday, it's about 8:30 in the evening. I've watered the garden, Tom is watering the back garden, we've eaten, and I have been off social media for 20 days and… I feel like a new person! I don't actually know if I want to go back on! So…stay tuned!

  Day 42, 21 February 2022

  Hello everyone. It's the 21st of February which means I have been off social media for 42 days.

  The benefits have been amazing. So amazing that I'm really considering never going back! But maybe going back to tell people that I'm not on there anymore because I didn't actually announce that I was taking a hiatus. I just put everything in a different area of my phone where I couldn't access it easily and then have quite impressed myself with my willpower and just not opened the apps for 42 days. Since the 10th of January.

  Interacting with people and connecting with people is still very, very important to me. It's the main reason I started blogging in the first place, because I wanted to be part of something and I wanted to join the conversations that were happening and I wanted to connect with people and help people feel less alone on the journey that they were on.

  And I still feel like that – but I feel like I can do it the way I used to do it. I started blogging with no idea what I was doing and no intention of growing a global audience or a brand or a following but that's exactly what ended up happening just purely organically and by accident. And I did all of it without social media! I really feel like blogging is going to have a renaissance and I want to get on that train before it leaves the station.

  So yeah, I'm not really sure what's going to happen next. All I know is that I'm enjoying this experiment greatly and I really hope whatever happens that you'll come along for the ride because I'm not going anywhere! I think that the world is changing and the world is waking up.

  Wherever you are and whatever you're doing, I send lots of love and I hope you're all well. Stay tuned! Thanks for listening.

Would you like to share your thoughts on this post with me? Please do - I’d love to hear from you!

quitting social media: an experiment

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. 

• VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

  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!

instagram vs reality

A page from my journal.

I like to give off the impression that I’m pretty together. That I’ve got my shit worked out or at least I have enough self-awareness to know what I need to work on. That I behave consciously. That I know what makes me happy and what doesn’t, and do my best to have as much as possible of the former in my life and the bare-arsed minimum of the latter.

And yet. And yet. I still care way too much about what things look like rather than what they feel like. I still care way too much about what people think. I still feel the sting of rejection and being misunderstood to my marrow. I still try far too hard to control other people’s impressions and experience of me. Ever since I arrived home, so many Phils have been competing to take the steering wheel off the only one I trust with this vehicle - wise, street-smart, calm Phil. All these other Phils I thought were satisfied now, their insecurities and baggage dealt with long ago. But no. No.

These past couple of years, my ego has been dying a slow, painful death. As it has lay dying, it has tried to show me, over and over again, that some (well, maybe around 90 per cent) of the things that I think matter really, really don’t. And that attempting to be part of the in crowd is a complete and utter waste of my time because I don’t belong there and I never have.

This afternoon, case in point. I had just made myself a mug of chai. I was still wearing my rather cool Kemi Telford skirt and cosy Witchery sweater from this morning’s client meeting. I thought I’d take a break from my work and enjoy a cup of tea. But then I thought “you’ve got such a nice outfit on, and this is such a pretty mug, and the light is nice, why don’t you take one of those ‘hands round the mug from above’ shots for Instagram?”

As I manipulated myself into place, I swear I could laughter from somewhere.

I read somewhere that the way all the influencers take these shots is by holding the phone in their mouths.

So there I was, outside, freezing, barefoot, with a blistering hot mug in my hands (turns out the handle is there for a reason!) and a phone in my mouth.

I could barely hold the mug, and I ended up with some kind of sore on my mouth, trying to keep the phone steady so I wouldn’t drop it and have it shatter on the concrete. The only photos I succeeded in taking were of inside my own mouth.

The phrase WTF? seemed designed for that very moment.

But all of a sudden, I saw myself.

And all I knew was I didn’t want to be this person.

And now, writing this, I feel released from something.

Every time I get drawn back into that world, of followers and likes and making everything look like a magazine and having an editorial calendar for your own bloody life, I will remember this moment.

There is so much I want to do with my life and none of it, none, involves burning my hands and hurting my mouth for a picture that won’t even legally belong to me any more once I upload it to that devilish platform.

But I also know I can’t be the only person out there who, on a day when they’re feeling a bit left out or vulnerable, sees everyone else’s shiny grids and perfectly-taken photos and feels a bit wistful….and then really, really lonely, like the uncool kid at school (which I was, so it’s a familiar feeling to me) looking at a world which, for some reason, you just aren’t part of. And every time you try to be a part of it, you end up falling flat on your face.

If you feel like that too, hi! I see you. Isn’t it hard pretending not to care when actually, deep down, you do care, even if it’s just a little bit? Isn’t it hard feeling the pull to fit in, because it’s so damn seductive?

But as Brene Brown has said, fitting in is not the same as belonging.

And I don’t want to fit in. Not really.

I try my best to be a bright, shiny, only-showing-my-good-side to the world woman, but actually….I’m pretty messy. Inside and out. My hair never behaves. My nails always break. My lipstick always ends up on my teeth. Whenever I wear white, I spill something on it. Every. Damn. Time. First world problems keep me awake at night. Some days I feel like everything is coming together and feel aligned with my purpose and calling, and other days I feel like I’ve accidentally burned all the bridges I’m trying to build.

I think being back home has reminded me of the pain of all those dark, lost years of my early adulthood, where I pretended that everything was fine and I had it all together but nothing could have been further from the truth. And sometimes I fall back into that trap. It’s hard to be real and honest and vulnerable when you’ve been hurt, both online and off. It’s hard to be yourself around people who don’t always appreciate or acknowledge how much you’ve changed, and therefore don’t always respond in the way you need or hope. But that’s another part of this revelation - I can only be me. I can only control my own actions. I can only be true to myself. I can be brave and put myself out there and know that I don’t need other people to behave or react in a certain way for me to feel safe or understood or seen or whatever. It’s hard, but it’s so freeing. The armour of perfection is too heavy.

So, no more phones in the mouth. It’s not for me. Only one-handed mug shots on my Instagram feed from now on. If at all. No more filters. Imperfection all the way. I’m going to do my best not to be afraid to show it.

PS: It took me sleeping on it to get the courage to hit publish on this post - but if life has taught me one lesson repeatedly, it’s the posts I’m most afraid to hit publish on that are probably the ones that need to be released. So here you are. Thank you for reading and listening to me :)