Challenge 1 : No social media for 30 days
So first let me say this: The choice WAS EASY!
I have always had a shaky relationship with social media. It was a guilty pleasure at times and at other times a source of a lot of toxicity. A few days before I had to make the choice for my challenge, I had noticed that I was consuming a lot more Instagram and Facebook than usual. I also caught myself comparing myself to some of my friends with different lives and influencers that are hundreds of kilometers away from me. I would make the effort of getting over it, but I was conscious that it was a useless cycle.
This realization as well as the challenge of the actually letting all go was interesting and so the choice was made. Now let me break down my social media use.
How this worked: What I left an what I kept.
The apps I used: Instagram, Messenger, Telegram, WhatsApp, Viber, Twitter. These were mostly deleted except for WhatsApp for close friends and Viber for family.
The pages opened on my browser constantly: Facebook and LinkedIn. I closed Facebook but continued to use LinkedIn for professional reasons.
Apps I check too much for my own good: Gmail.
Time: according to my phone I was using social media about 2h a day. Notice this means that for a sum of 2h a day, I was scrolling up or down or answering messages. The alarming part was probably the fact that I was very up to date in my insta and Facebook, never a good thing.
What happened.
So, on the night of January 1st I deleted all the social media apps on my phone and vowed not to open any of them anywhere else. and that is still the case today, January 30th until tomorrow for exactly 30 days off.
The first week was weird. Mostly because my life was changing plenty and I could use some common ground and usual habits of sitting on the bed and scrolling up and down. When this wasn’t an option I turned to games. I used some childish games to keep my mind from absolutely freaking out but it still felt difficult to keep out.
Something that did help is that I had a few contacts of very close people on WhatsApp that I was able to ping just out of nowhere and talk to. After a while I found out that: the less people you talk to, the better you talk to people!
When I didn’t have 3 or 5 open discussions all going on at the same time, I found myself having deeper and more meaningful conversations with the 1 or 2 that were open. I came to the conclusion at some point that, social media is a ruse. We don’t need 200 people in our lives, we would be perfectly happy with 10, 5 we live with, 3 we see every day at work and 2 we tell everything to. or even less.
By the second week, my days grew more interesting and it became harder to fight the urge to post or check on where others are. But also, the busier i was the more i had to focus on myself and my everyday life, so social life took a back seat.
At this point something interesting happened, I remembered that I got Facebook notifications on my email! yeah, misstep! but it turned out quiet okay. I only considered the notifications that were about messages receive, and even then, I was able to control my urges to answer everyone. I would only send a msg on WhatsApp to people whose messages would probably contain something urgent … yeah, I know, a friend of mine called this a conspiracy theory.
Finally, the harshest part in the journey was the ACTUAL journey! I travelled! and I DID NOT POST IT ANYWHERE! yes, it felt weird but the fact that it felt weird weirded me out and helped me realize how weird social media is in a quiet weird way.
Lessons learned.
Enough of the practicalities, I’m sure you all want to know what I LEARNED.
We don’t need social media; social media needs us. In a sense where, it may sometimes feel like we don’t even understand how people lived before Facebook and Gmaps, but they did. And they were happy and they had deep relationships and everything. We could be just fine. And maybe, for some people, it is a genuinely better choice to stay off of these new technological facilitators.
Some people can be very sensitive to so much exposure and social pressure, I admit I absolutely am. And for these people, like diabetes, they have to be ware of this sweet guilty pleasure.
I reiterate what I said earlier about the depth of the conversations. The less noise there is, the clearer voices are. I found myself making phone calls and sending messages to just ask how people are simply because I do care. Not because that person popped online, but because they came to mind. I was more present on dinner and lunch tables with the people I see on an everyday basis and I enjoyed the mundane interaction rather than the obsessive consumption of news and notifications.
On my journey, I had times when I met new people and they wanted to ‘keep in touch’. At first, I gave away my socials and just said: “meet you there in about a week!”. But after a couple of times doing this I thought, if I had Instagram, I would keep in touch with all the travelers that I only spent a couple hours with, but do I need to? Should I even? Isn’t it healthier that I only keep their words in mind and the little moments we shared rather than go scroll down their feeds and break the barriers of imagination?
Yes, maybe the friendships I made could go a long way, but they rarely do. And it’s almost always better to remember the person for the little bit spent together than to have them popping into your feed every day.
Now finally, my last conclusion. I will work on making my socials, as in Instagram and Facebook because I don’t use any others so far, as realistic as possible. If you’re a consistently present person in my life, welcome to my feed. If you’re not, then why should you be there? I would happily answer or help you if you need me but other than that, you’re just noise. And I could go further into saying, I would be noise on your account too.
