In early October last year, I decided to go off social media (not including LinkedIn, which I still prefer to think of as a business tool and not social media, but I know this is debatable). Most people are either shocked, horrified, or voyeuristically curious.
Before I went on hiatus, I tried to modulate my IG and fb time. I would click in and tell myself just to watch a few stories of people I care about and scroll until I start to see too many ads.
Spoiler alert: I would easily lose an hour scrolling endlessly before I even noticed the time (despite the hour being right there at the top of my screen). And afterward, I often had the same gross feeling one gets when one is hungry and, instead of eating a meal, downs a full bag of Cheetos. Not good.
Even though the downside of being overly attached to social media is clearly icky, it is VERY hard to shake. Friends would talk to me about things they figured I already knew (because, didn’t I watch their story??!), pop culture references flew right over my head, and my click-finger got miiiiighty itchy. It is no walk in the park to break an addictive habit.
Now that I’ve been off social media for over five months though, I’ve had a chance to shake that twitchy feeling and notice some shifts in my life:
I feel less angst
I have been reading more
I watch shows more intentionally (vs. scrolling with one eye on the TV and having to rewind constantly)
I reach out more often to friends to find out how they are and to catch up for real, not just through their posts
I take more walks
I still struggle to figure out if I can have a “healthy” relationship with social media. If I can engage with it without falling down the rabbit hole each and every time I log in. Enough years of knowing my behaviors on it – and how quickly I get right back to my prior habits – tell me I’m still probably not ready to even dabble. And yet…it still calls to me to be part of something so intrinsic (even if deeply unhealthy) to our culture. Living in that paradox is a day-to-day quandary…
