As some of you may already be aware, I’m pretty big on New Year’s resolutions. Since 2018 was Dry January year, I needed some other dopamine drip to rip out of my life this time around. Taking an honest look at my life, at what most made me twitch, I had to accept my true millennial status — and begrudgingly, I knew I had to ditch social media: Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
First lesson: it was not nearly as hard as you might imagine. The strings that hold us to the Facebook machine are spindlier than we know, for all their psychic and political power. Thirty days of “feed”-free living makes it obvious exactly how accurate the metaphor is, a constant, tasteless, gloppy supply funneled straight down our throats.
I did make a couple of exceptions during ban time:
- I made a rule ahead of time that I was allowed to use social media as I deemed necessary for work, which in this case involved A: responding to Twitter-based pitch calls I get weekly in a stellar writer’s newsletter and B: promoting and doing some minor reader response for my long-awaited, uber-personal Huffington Post publication.
- I signed onto Facebook to post a status about how sad I was when I heard about Mary Oliver’s death. Misery loves company, man.
- And when my boyfriend of two months up and ghosted me (after having flown across the country with me to meet my parents [lol yes really]), I did use social media — at first to check and make sure he was not dead and later to glare indignantly at his everything’s-totally-fine-here Instagram posts once I discerned that he was, as my mother so eloquently put it, “not dead, just mean.”
A few more discrete lessons gleaned from the experience:
- How much I rely on social media for news. (Yikes, I know.) I hadn’t heard about Mary Oliver’s death, Elizabeth Warren’s confirmation to run, etc, until informed directly by a friend or seeing the information alluded to as a clue in the New York Times crossword. This despite the fact I get NYT newsletters delivered to my inbox and am, social media or no, a person with a phone.
- How many direct social interactions I sacrifice on the altar of social media. Not being able to post to Facebook or Instagram encouraged me to reach out directly to individuals I actually know, in some cases rekindling lapsed relationships, when I had some snarky one-liner or beautiful photo I just had to share. It was more intimate, less posturing, and sparked actual conversations.
- That I can pretty easily find other ways to waste time. A lot of people freak out when, courtesy of some app whose marketing relies heavily on the term “digital wellness,” they learn the exact number of per-week hours they rack up scrolling through the digital gloop. And while those figures can certainly be disconcerting, I’m here to tell you that I quickly and easily substituted Facebook with only-arguably-more-productive activities, like playing this insanely addictive word game. (I suppose it’s also true that I finally wrote a real book outline this month [NO WE’RE NOT TALKING ABOUT THAT YET], which I’ve aspired to for a literal decade, but it doesn’t feel like a causation, or even correlation, thing — just timing.)
- How much pressure I feel to respond RIGHT AWAY whenever I see that little red notification alert, and how unimportant/unhealthy that urgency actually is. Especially after I posted the HuffPo piece, my inbox was flooded. I read and replied to a few of them, but for the large part, I decided: all of this can wait until February. I’m trying to re-learn to use online messaging as I did when it was first introduced to me: less surrogate phone call, more low-key, time-lapsed, digital-message-in-a-bottle system.
- That Twitter is somehow, at least for me, less must-finish-feed triggering than Facebook or Instagram. I logged on a couple of times to see the above-mentioned work-related Tweets, and I was never sucked into the rabbit hole.
- I did actually miss Instagram, though. And disturbingly-ish, I noticed I take fewer photos when there’s no self-manufactured pressure to post the next super-likable, overly-filtered snapshot of my life. The pressure itself, of course, is stupid. But is recording less of my life a good thing or a bad thing? That’s another blog post.
As February descends, I do plan to reintroduce social media to my life, using it to connect with people whose phone numbers I don’t yet have and stalk potential dating partners and, yes, ogle other peoples’ travels.
But the experience of living without it for a month has been quieting and at least a little eye-opening: worth doing, if you’re at all curious.