I Took 6-Months off From Social Media | Notes From the Field
Ten years ago, I was living in a studio apartment in Chicago that I couldn't afford - selling sub-par paintings at a local gallery on the weekends to make rent. I lived on the nineteenth floor. The bathroom was in the closet, my bed and my couch were one and the same, and I could only walk sideways through the kitchen, but the silver lining was that the entire south wall of my apartment was a window overlooking the lake and the city. My only roommate was my dog, Frank. I didn’t know anyone else quite yet. And we would sit on the floor with the lights off at night, looking over the moonlit lake, and also into the countless apartments in the building next to us. A hundred little squares. Some pitch black, but many lit up - couples cooking in the kitchen, a man watching a silent movie, a young woman reading, a few cats in the windows, people moving from one room to the next, blotted out in between by the building, traversing hallways, shutting one light off and turning another on, dancing, together and alone, sitting, together and alone, stumbling in, heading out, sleeping. There was so much to look at. So much to think about. So much life happening at the same time as my own.
I first got Facebook to keep in touch with my family. Between full-time school and work, it proved an easy way to keep my twenty or so friends updated. None of my professors utilized social media. There wasn’t a marketplace or business pages. The people in the building next to me were never scrolling on cell phones. I never thought to take a picture out that window and post it online. No one ever asked me for my handle. And no one was sliding into my DMs. Not at first.
Ten years ago - on June 10th, 2010, to be exact - I did get a private message on Facebook from someone I hadn’t talked to or seen for nearly a decade before that. A message that would turn into a year-long conversation. A conversation between two people who were far away from each other, but who used the veneer of social media to talk more honestly than perhaps we would have in person. We posted songs on each other’s walls, we “poked” each other when that was still a cool and exciting thing, we shared art and stories and recounted our days to each other, all through this new platform. After more than a year, we finally met up in person. A year after that we were living together, and a year after that we were married. So kudos to the early days of Facebook, when it was mostly benign, and before we knew it was created as a disgusting experiment to rank college girls. Ignorance is bliss.
Fast forward. June, 2020. Everything that can change has changed in ten years. I can’t even feel the nostalgic rush it used to give me when my husband and I reminisce about our early Facebook romance - it’s not the same place anymore. Things are dismal. I won’t and don’t need to talk about how shitty 2020 was. You know. We all know. No explanation needed. We’re all in it. But I have thousands of “friends” and followers on multiple social media platforms now - too many really - all of which require that I position my posts ever-so-differently. I want to make sure my Instagram is branded, my Twitter is witty, and Facebook is just a black hole of disinformation and anger now that I already wholly avoid. I’m tired. And strung out by the world - the constant crashing of it - through the news, through my phone, through social media. But I’m a business owner, so I feel like I have to keep up, and even once I get to the point that I don’t feel like I need to market my business on social media so much anymore, I find myself framing my every day life in my head. I think about which angle of our weekend hike will make for the best shot. I worry a lot about not documenting special experiences. As a storyteller, I’m compelled to craft my Stories in such a way that really represents “the real me,” which is entirely filtered through how I think my platform should look. I know social media has become a problem - for all of us. I can feel it. But I also continue to believe in the benefit it might have. I believe in it the same way an addict believes they’re made better by a drug.
Because the best thing I’ve seen social media used for in a long time was activism. There’s real opportunity now to get the attention of the masses since they’re already scrolling through the feeds. Coordinated activism efforts on social media fueled Black Lives Matter and have been able to call attention to global crises and causes that need and deserve support from around the world. At its best, social media can be an engine for restorative, even radical, change. At its worst, though, it becomes an inversion of this - a place that sucks you into a pit of comparison, into a pit of desolation and despair about a broken world you can’t fix, a forum for big business to sell you on products and lifestyles and shoulds and coulds, an echo chamber that keeps you encapsulated and your perspective shallow, a kiln for your anxiety, and when your Screen Time report shows just how many hours a day you spend looking at your phone, you realize how much social media is actually claiming a big chunk of your lifespan.
Bleak, right? I know.
So I deleted all of it.
I missed staring out of windows. I missed truly being by myself.
And for anyone wondering what that’s been like, here are my notes:
GOING OFFLINE WAS SO MUCH EASIER THAN I EXPECTED.
I thought that deleting my social media cold turkey would feel like quitting coffee or smoking - that there would be withdrawals, that I would miss it, that I’d lose touch with people, that my business would take a hit - but I was wrong. At first, I found myself instinctually reaching for my phone anytime I had a down moment - red lights, commercials, if I finished work early, while in the passenger seat on a drive. My hands just found their way to my phone and pointed to an app that didn’t exist there anymore without me really thinking about it at all. And that freaked me out. It passed quickly, though, and my brain transitioned and filled in those downtime moments with my thoughts again. It was like a switch. It was like my brain had been waiting for this sort of attention. It felt entirely natural to be present in my life again. Within a week, I didn’t want anything to do with social media anymore. At all. I still kind of don’t.
SOCIAL MEDIA IS NOT ESSENTIAL.
Social media is a tool, not an identity. But the way these platforms are structured make it tough to not confuse the two. It creates an insidious delusion that really services the rich. (If you think following people like Kylie Jenner is harmless because you secretly love to fantasize about her life or emulate these people in some way, you’re wrong. They are the engines of capitalism and are making more money from that post you just “liked” than you’ll ever see in a year. Unfollow them.) At the end of the day, social media platforms have conflated us into both user and product, not just selling our data but creating algorithms that make us feel like we need to post a certain amount, be “liked” a certain amount, have a certain amount of followers, a certain amount of engagement, so we can have a certain amount of worth. I can’t tell you how many times business opportunities have tried to tell me that income is directly related to social media stats. Nonsense. Social media is the next best scam after credit cards and student loan debt.
Let me speak directly to entrepreneurs. Social media can help you. It helped me. But you also don’t need it. At all. If you hate it, if you don’t want to use it, then don’t. In fact, in the worst year of all our lives, I was able to nearly double my client base once I left social media. All of a sudden, I had a lot more time to actually do real work out in the world - to have real conversations that led to wonderful partnerships, to meet people out in the field because there was nowhere else to meet them now, to invest in really learning about SEO marketing and website optimizations, to invest in PR and feature-based marketing, to re-invest and evolve the grassroots efforts I built my business on so many years ago. If you can use social media as a tool and with healthy boundaries, awesome. If you can’t, ditch it.
SERIOUSLY, F*** HASHTAGS.
That’s it. That’s the whole lesson. Hashtags as like playing social media Go Fish, and I’m done with them.
THE PEOPLE WHO REALLY NEED YOU DON’T HAVE SOCIAL MEDIA.
The people in dire need of help don’t have the luxury of scrolling through social media - kids, teens, and adults in psychiatric institutions, incarcerated people, refugees, victims of domestic violence, the homeless, the disenfranchised, the poor, the sick, people who live without clean water, in food deserts, in war-torn nations run by apoplectic bigots. These people need more than social media activism to help lift them out of their dire situations, so while spreading knowledge through your feeds and encouraging your followers to donate to different causes is important, start asking yourself: what’s the next step? What’s one more thing I can do outside of social media to help?
ACTIVISM SHOULD BE CHALLENGING.
We found ourselves in a conundrum in 2020. While it was ineffably important to get in the streets, to protest, to scream for a call to action, to support the Black community and, as white people, to gift our privilege forward the best we can, Covid often stood in our way. As a person with asthma, I felt paralyzed by Covid for quite some time (which you can read more about here if you’d like), and directed my efforts toward social media campaigns, writing articles, offering more mentorships, and financially supporting an array of causes. But this is a reminder that as we receive the vaccine, the fight rages on. Once we’re safe, how can we better challenge and reform the system? Hint: it’s going to take much more than social media.
WE HAVE SOME HARD TRUTHS TO FACE ABOUT EACH OTHER NOW. IS THAT NORMAL?
Because of this collective flocking to social media, I’m sure you, too, have watched in disbelief as many of your family members and friends have devolved into flailing Qanon anxiety attacks that perpetuate racism, anti-semitism, and white supremacy in ways that make me wonder if I can ever be close to those people again. 2020 felt like 2016 in that way - when all of a sudden many of us were blindsided by close family members who rallied for Trump and seemed to unzip whatever costume they’d been wearing our whole lives to reveal some dark inner truths. What do we do with this information? Is this the first time in history we’ve been able to see so deeply into each other through social media? How can we repair relationships torn apart by disparate fundamental and moral belief systems? I don’t have any answers. At all. But I know that distancing myself from social media and taking a break from that shit show has made a huge difference for my mental health.
I’VE MISSED SOME THINGS.
I have some positive things to say about social media. Swear. And these are the things that I’ve missed:
Artist accounts
Poets and writers and literature posts
Memes - though I have nice friends who’ve kept me in the loop with the important ones. Shout out to them. That was important work you did for me.
So that’s it. That’s what I’ve missed, and while that list is short, the content that comes with that short list is massive. As a creative, this is where I’ve landed with social media. In all of my time away, I’ve learned a simple thing - a thing I already knew: that true connection is made through creation and storytelling, and that social media has the power to facilitate this type of connection when we’re honest, when we’re level, and when we balance it with attending our real lives. Because we can’t balance that which controls us.
So I’ll see you on the ‘Gram sometimes, and I hope we can share stories and art and interesting things. I hope we can rally for causes and ask ourselves what else we can do. I hope we can share without selling ourselves. I hope you can truly see me and I can truly see you through the screen. I hope we can use social media as a tool, not an identity, to illuminate our humanity, not destroy it.
I’ve missed you all. Let’s talk more.
XOXO