What I've Learned In Three Months Offline
Hi friends! As we come up on the end of December, I have a few blog posts for you coming up—one is more of a round up of things we’ve been up to since Halloween (we had a couple of big milestones in our family!), and one is the annual post that seems to be the one people like the most about the best books I read in 2024. I always write that one from my parent’s house over our vacation, so that post will be coming your way the last week of December (besides what if I read an incredible book in the next two weeks? I have to let myself include it!) But for today, as we begin the process of closing out another year, I thought I’d share the biggest realizations I’ve had and things I have learned (as well as answer the number 1 question I’ve gotten) about signing out of all social media for what’s already been a quarter of a year!
The bottom line is actually very simple: I thought I was going to miss it like crazy. I don’t miss it at ALL. That’s been the biggest surprise to me but is one hundred percent true. I haven’t missed it for a moment. I don’t think about it anymore. I thought for sure this would feel like some huge “Lenten type” sacrifice that I would muscle through for a year and immediately sign in the moment September 23 rolls around again next year. That has not been my experience in the slightest, and I think that’s for several reasons which I’ll share more about here.
The biggest event we went through in the past 3 months was probably our presidential election, and the thing I noticed is that while I’m not thrilled with the results, I didn’t stay in a place of anger or grief or rage the way I know many others have experienced because I didn’t “marinate” in ALL THE WORDS people shared online in the week following the election. I saw the results, I processed with a few close friends who I know shared my reaction, and in the days that followed I found myself continuing in the things I had to do to serve my family and community—I took dinner to a family going through cancer treatment, I served ice cream with friends at our school ice cream social, I drove kids around and enjoyed a visit with my folks. These things, rather than scrolling and scrolling through everyone’s thoughts and takes almost immediately helped even-out my emotions. I think in elections past I would scroll and scroll through everyone’s stories, thoughts, links, and all their words and constantly re-insert myself into the tidal waves of indignation, fury, fear, etc (or elation, relief, joy etc depending on the results!) that others were experiencing, thus keeping myself in a much more emotionally stirred up state for much longer. I would start to feel better, pull up to a red light, tap open Instagram and all of a sudden be sucked right back into a place of “can you BELIEVE what is happening?!” thus perpetuating the stirred up state of feelings. This happens on BOTH sides as we have all created these online echo chambers for ourselves that continue to reinforce what the echo chamber wants us to feel.
Here’s the thing; people have wonderful words to share about their grief and fear over really anything that happens, I’m not saying they don’t (here I am sharing my thoughts and opinions online as well!), but the thing is a vast majority of the people I would have read post-election words from are people I don’t actually know. They’re wonderful thought leaders and authors primarily from the more progressive Christian world whom I adore, and yet, I don’t know them. I will always, always support their work by purchasing their new books, but I realized once I could no longer follow all their thoughts and takes on any event that’s happened this fall, I found myself returning to a much more emotionally balanced place. It’s been fascinating and SUPER alarming to me to see over even just 3 months out of this space how much our echo-chambers we’ve all created for ourselves by selecting who we want to follow really do impact our emotional and mental health.
The other big thing I’ve been reflecting on is the idea of news/information. When my folks came to visit in November there was a wildfire raging outside of Los Angeles that particular week. My dad asked if I had heard about it and I said I had, it had actually been written about in the New York Times that morning, but I had not heard about it on our local news app. He made the comment that this was such a big fire and he felt like it wasn’t receiving the national coverage it should be, that so many people didn’t know it was happening. I agreed that many probably didn’t know this fire was burning, but I have not stopped thinking about that brief interaction. If I had been on social media I would have known about it immediately, we used to live in Los Angeles and still have many friends there. But the question that keeps ruminating in my mind is “but what would that knowledge do? Does a fire burning 3,000 miles away need to take up mental and emotional real estate in my mind?” Now on one hand, I could say “Of course I need to care about all these things happening around our country and globe! Of course I should be as informed as possible about ALL THE THINGS! That’s being a good human and co-citizen of this planet! Being informed builds our empathy and compassion and we HAVE to know what’s happening everywhere at all times!” And yet, hundreds of research projects have shown that the human mind is just not designed to contain all the news from around the country or world. We can’t. We can’t process it all, we can’t hold all the suffering we see, we were not created with brains or hearts to contain and care about all the things we could possibly see or become concerned about. The vast access we have in real time to news stories and suffering unfolding around the world is just not what our brains were created to process, and I truly think staying immersed in these 24-7 news cycles has really harmed us as a society in terms of our mental and emotional health.
When I signed out of social media I didn’t want to just replace scrolling Instagram with scrolling some news site or other app, which is a super easy trap to fall into! The phones in general are enticing and addicting! So I have been trying something this fall that has actually been so helpful. I wanted to pretend like I was back in the mid-90s when it came to my news consumption rather than be inundated with story after story all day as I opened Facebook every hour or tapped open a news app multiple times a day. I don’t receive a newspaper in print or watch the NBC Nightly News at 6PM like we did “back then” but I realized the thing about the way we received our information is that it was in an amount we could handle in any given day, it limited our news consumption to what could be communicated in a designated amount of time or space. So I made some decisions about what I was going to let myself consume this year. I have one local news app on my phone, a subscription to the New York Times app, and the BBC app, and I check them each in the morning for about 15 minutes and again in the evening after I get the kids down for about 10-15 minutes. That’s it. And what I’ve found is I actually feel MORE informed than i did when I was getting my news from whatever stories were popping up on social media or trending for the day. The NYT does a weekly quiz to see how well you followed the week’s news and this morning I missed one question this week, which was a sports story, so I know I’m really well informed about what’s happening even though my amount of time online has diminished. I think it’s because my time and attention is much more focused instead of just following clicks and rabbit trails and opinion pieces throughout the day.
And yes, my world has shrunk socially—well actually no, that’s not the right way to say that. My social life is exactly the same, I am still in contact daily and weekly with the same people I was, I just know far less about what is happening to people outside this circle. I miss seeing my cousin’s posts the most, and I want to get better about reaching out to them directly to see what’s going on with them and their families, and yes I’m not seeing what friends from seasons past are up to, but because I wasn’t in regular contact with these folks to begin with I’m not sure that’s a bad thing. If anything I think signing off social media where we have a constant steady drip of what we perceive as social interaction because we are liking or commenting on things actually has inspired me more to pursue those one on one reaching out moments to see how someone actually is. Usually I would have posted a photo on Thanksgiving of the meal I created for Chuck’s side of the family and my cousin Brian and I would have commented on one another’s photos of cranberries (the two of us have a decades long shared affection of them). We would have liked one another’s photos and each made one comment about how we wished we were sharing the meal together. Instead he texted his brother and my sister and I (the 4 of us spent every Thanksgiving together for a solid two decades) and the 4 of us had a delightful group text for the evening where we shared a few photos, brought up a few inside jokes, and actually had an interaction that left me chuckling and smiling through the night. I would choose that type of interaction a hundred times over a quick “like” of his photo of cranberries.
This past week Asher was asked to play a song on the piano at the middle school Christmas concert at school (he’s only in 4th grade but the music teacher heard him playing and was beyond impressed so she invited him to be the solo performer of the evening). He was so nervous and proud and all the feelings that come with a first public performance of any kind. We filmed it and sent it to the grandparents, aunts, and close friends and he LOVED seeing the comments they texted back to him. It was such a personal interaction with people he knows in his everyday life, and that made the whole thing so much more meaningful for him instead of receiving lovely comments but from people who truly haven’t even met him. Again, my world feels smaller, more intimate, and that doesn’t feel like a bad thing.
The number 1 question I’ve received, entirely from other moms because moms are often the communicators and detail gatherers for families, is “how are you managing keeping up with places like school or other organizations who primarily use social media for communication?” This was honestly my biggest concern going into this year—our school has a few different communication channels but the most up to date and accurate one is their Facebook page. Likewise for the youth group and church and karate, all these organizations post announcements and events on their pages regularly that don’t always make it into an email. I asked a friend who also has sworn off social media how she handles this and I just did what she did. I created a Facebook account that literally has zero friends attached to it and used that account to follow about 5 organizations I need to stay up to date with—karate, the church, the youth group, the school, and a Florida weather guy who is my go to expert on all things hurricane season. I don’t put the app on my phone, I sign in about once a week from my computer and quickly glance through any announcements made by these groups and then sign out—the whole thing takes about 3 minutes, there’s nothing to scroll through since I’m not following or friending anyone on this page, and I’ll be honest there are many weeks I completely forget to even do this. Social media can be a great communication tool, so signing in once a week for a couple minutes to gather information I need has worked great and has not at all tempted me to want to wade back in to the scrolling of all the people and content that exists there.
It really has been a lovely fall, and I know many folks around me are wrestling with the same questions—can I really give it up? What would I do for sharing and communication in place of these platforms? How will I stay informed and connected? I think these are great questions to wrestle with. All I can share is that I now have about 5 folks in my life who have signed out completely and all 5 of them have said the same thing, once they stepped away they realized they don’t miss it and aren’t remotely tempted to go back. We’re finding lovely alternatives to the things we loved about social media—newsletter subscriptions to read more long-form writing from folks we appreciate, sharing photos with family via their Skylight digital picture frames, using Voxer to keep up with friends in real conversations, there are so many alternatives!
Whatever your relationship with online platforms, I hope you find some moments of peace, of being unplugged this holiday season. And I’d love to hear back from you—what do you think you’d miss the most?
