Tag: social media

The Break Up, Part 5

Published on by RLeave a comment

Here is the final installment on my series about leaving social media and time wasting apps. If you’ve made it through them all, thank you so much for giving your time up to read these. For Part 1, click here! For Part 2, click here! For Part 3, click here!  For Part 4, click here!

Since breaking up with socials and time wasting apps, my life looks a little more analog than it used to. I wish it looked even moreso, but each time I threaten to abandon all technology and my iPhone, I remember how much I love having audiobooks, streaming music, and GPS and I have to content myself with the progress I have made. 

Just like the most strict of dieters will have a slice of cake at a birthday, or munch on candy at a Christmas party, I have slip ups back into the internet spiral. While I am joyfully disinterested in using social media as it has been reinvented (perhaps more on this another day), I have been known to reinstall YouTube on my phone when sick or recovering from a medical issue. Granted, a lot of what I watch is on education and journaling, but eventually that algorithm drops me into “You can buy WHAT from a Japanese vending machine??” And after a day or two of finding myself swept down the stream of those polluted waters, I gasp up from the surface and delete the app again, and reserve another library book. 

I find myself enjoying catching up with friends when we meet up in person and being able to ask “what’s new with you?” And everything they tell me is actually new. I didn’t get to watch the live version, but I’ll happily get the replay over a glass of sparkling water and an appetizer. This is one of the most delightful perks of not being on Instagram– actually being able to discuss life events with no “Oh yeah, I saw that on your stories!”

It is also interesting to have to relay the same information about a family issue, fun vacation, or health crisis to different people in person multiple times, instead of it being blasted via a one-and-done post on Facebook. I’ve begun to work on the art of summarizing concisely for the right audience. This will be a life long lesson, for as you can tell I do not excel at brevity.  

I’d like to say I would never return to social media. I have kept my accounts open thus far as a way to buy used curriculum or furniture on Facebook and as a way to get addresses from people with whom I am connected on Instagram. But while I have not been tempted to head to the timeline time-warp yet, I don’t know if it’s all bets off for life. I’ve been humbled one too many times to say never. I just hope that if I do, I don’t use it as often or in the same way I used to. 

That being said, I am thankful for what this nearly 2 year breakup has done in my life. I am thankful that while I have not attained some arbitrary level of perfection, I am growing. I’m learning hard lessons on my way. I am challenging myself and being challenged. I am loving being a rebel and breaking the mold by simply refusing to play the game everyone else is. (Those that know me in person know especially well how much I enjoy being rebellious in really weird ways. It’s why I don’t color my gray hair, why there is one ride at Disneyland which I have never ridden despite having gone hundreds of times, and why I refuse to spend more than $15 on a pair of jeans.)

If you’ve read thus far and thought, “This broad sure is a stuck up stick in the mud and shouldn’t tell us what to do.” I want to say a few things: 

You don’t have to do anything I am doing. If I inspire some people to rethink how they spend their time, then all the better. But if that’s not for you, then please find what it is that makes you a more complete, whole, and cultured person and do that. I also am not judging anyone but myself here. (Okay with one exception, I never reposted those weird self-deprecation but also self aggrandizing memes that I talked about, I am totally judging that, because it shows a real lack of self-awareness.) But to my point, I was the one with the social media addiction. I was the one spending my time unwisely. I was the one falling into group-think. I was the one being lazy. I was the one putting off a good book for a bad scroll. I share these thoughts not to bash you, but to show here’s how far I fell into those traps, and how I made the change to get myself out.

My husband, one of my sisters, and good friends use social media. They are content to do so. They derive some measure of pleasure from it and find positive things to glean from it. I love those people, and I do not judge them. I don’t love you personally, because I don’t know you. I love you in that you are my neighbor, and I do not judge you— because I do not know you!

I do see the irony in using the internet to share these thoughts, but I do not expect anyone to read them should they choose not to, and frankly as I’m not reposting this on socials, I’m not sure anyone will find it, unless someone else chooses to share there. Our internet used to be big, but another frustration of social media is that it has become very small, and we only  consume those things which are placed in our feeds. Ah, a topic for another day. 

Instead of telling you to get off social media or dumb down your phone, I would love to encourage you to pick one area of life you want to better yourself in. Pick some small and attainable action items to get yourself toward that goal. Stick with it, run with it. And you just never know what the end result will be. For me? It was removing the distraction of social media so I could think my own thoughts. What it became? Progress on the path to becoming more cultured, bettering my mind, and my soul. A one woman revolution.

The Break Up: Part 3

Published on by R2 Comments

This is Part 3 on my series about leaving social media. For Part 1, click here! For Part 2, click here!

I had even more time to fill. Of course I say this somewhat tongue in cheek. As a homeschooling mother of 6, deeply involved in her local community church life, always hosting or attending something, I was always busy. But instead of stuffing funny videos in the cracks of my day like rags in a leaky boat, I looked for better things. 

I used to journal as a young woman, but it was a discipline I had given up with motherhood. I also had Facebook to scream every thought I had the moment I had it. I realized I had “journaled” my children’s firsts, funny sayings, sweet moments, and lives, not on paper for my family to appreciate in posterity one day, but on social media.  Now that it was gone, how would I ever remember these events? I began to write. Like write write. First with my trusty Ink Joy gel pens, on whatever weight paper came in a notebook, then I moved to the appreciation of good heavy fountain pens, some with inky thick nibs and others with satisfyingly scratchy fine ones. I began to buy journals based on how nice the paper was. Some I carried them with me, others stayed hidden away in my room. I started to appreciate the sensory act of writing and the joy of writing something I actually cared about enough to leave my kids to read when they are grown. I also realized that not everything needs to be remembered or written down for posterity. Facebook was my baby book. It frankly doesn’t matter that the second time my child ate solid food it was bananas, and the third it was rice and the fourth it was strawberries. I didn’t need to remember that the quality of Target diapers in 2020 had really gone down since 2016. I didn’t even need to hold on tightly to every, single funny thing my child ever said. 

In a day and age of nearly endless storage, we have documented our lives to an unhealthy extent. I don’t think we were meant to always remember every dish we cooked, every walk we embarked upon, every coffee we sipped. It is good to forget some things, and it is good to find those things which are of value and treasure them as the special memories they are. Not everything needs to be placed in an acid free sleeve and mounted on the wall for all to see. 

I’ve begun to mark deeper looks into each child’s personality, their struggles, their strengths. What does it matter that I marked what my child was wearing when we got hot cocoa together? But it does matter to carefully observe and note that child is struggling with reading and the things I am doing to help them, so I can remember what I did and look back in the future to see if we made progress or stalled out. I can readjust and learn alongside them. It does matter to remember not just something nice they did (though that is lovely), but to write about the child’s character and how she is regularly helpful or kind or courageous. Those things do not make for good scrolling and liking fodder. Those things give you actionable items to hold yourself accountable to in 3 months to see how you’ve helped them. My children’s milestones, memories, and metrics do not belong to your infinite scroll. They don’t even belong to mine. They are ours— our family’s— to be studied, observed, and treasured. 

Apart from having broken away from the social media as a baby book trap, I turned to a new form of writing. Instead of resharing pithy and ridiculously banal quotes in meme format, to my timeline, I kept a Commonplace book. I would write down meaningful quotes, things that made me think, and respond to those things. I collected new words, Latin sayings, and wrote down prayers. I have since filled 3 entire Commonplace books and am on my 4th. I still have a lot to say, but I no longer have to care what other people on Facebook think about it. Whether they find me too conservative or too liberal, whether they think my quotes juvenile or pretentious, whether they are impressed with what I’m reading or look down on me for not reading something more difficult. 

What is most remarkable is that without the lazy convenience of a reshare button, I alone decide what is worthy of noting. I started this process thinking about the lack of fresh ideas people have because we’ve all fallen into the group-think, echo chamber pit. I would read a 2-6 sentence screenshot or meme formatted item that caused me all of 12.6 seconds to read and ponder before I hit that re-share button. Sometimes with such impressive commentary of my own like “THIS.” Or “LOUDER.” Or “Jussayin’” I cringe thinking back on all of the banal pith I shared because I found it edgy or profound. I was just sharing the same stuff 50% of the people around me were thinking and pissing the other 50% off. If it was funny, about 50% of the people in my list of friends also found it funny, because it was another one of those “just like us” moments. How noble to find only those things that are “just like us” attractive, humorous, or poignant. 

In reading widely (I’m working on the deeply thing, speed reading dies hard, and I can’t seem to slow it down) from good books, I began to find nuggets of wisdom and truth. And some of those were deeply offensive and hard to swallow because they pointed out my own faults. To be sure, I don’t mean those terrible reshares that people use for pity. You know the ones: “you may call my ability to love weak, but if giving of myself makes me weak, then I’ll gladly wear the title.” That trivial swill is meant only for the deeply shallow who cannot think past their own false eyelashes. When I say I wrote things down in my commonplace that cut me, it was finding conviction in things about myself that needed to change. I also did find joy in a beautifully worded sentence, the perfectly placed response in the middle of a novel (very un-shareable without context), a lovely line of poetry, or sometimes not even a direct quote, but a rewriting of a portion in the book I was reading which fired my long-cold memory skills into action. 

I began to find my own thoughts again, and since I was spending less time on the internet as a whole by this point, if someone else had already had the same thoughts, I was blissfully unaware, enjoying using my own mind to work through and find the solutions on my own. 

We are not impressed with the young mathematician because he has copied all of the correct answers. Anyone with a teacher’s manual can do the same. We are impressed with the young mathematician who has done the hard work necessary to get to those answers. For the first time in a long time, I was grappling and fighting to come to conclusions that were not the result of what I was told I should observe or believe or think, rather, I was seeking them out. Are they all right? Are they all wrong? Some are surely right and some definitely wrong, but I now have the space to find those footholds and places to grab onto while I climb the mountain of information that I intake.

(Tune in next week on the same Bat Channel at the same Bat Time for Part 4!)

The Break Up: Part 2

Published on by R3 Comments

This is Part 2 on my series about leaving social media. For Part 1, click here!

My friends weren’t waiting for me now that I’d left social media… so who was? My children were there waiting. They didn’t need to be told that it was good for mom to put the phone down, they just knew it. I immersed myself in their education with greater vigor and interest. I took their schooling far more seriously. Granted, that was in part that this break up with social media coincided with the beginning of Junior High, which was just going to require more careful planning and attention. But, nevertheless, I embraced it. I started to take more seriously the planning that went into the long term goals of education I had for my children. Getting my head out of the shallow waters of this week of this month of this grade, and popping up to see the ocean in front of me that had to be crossed to get to the high school finish line. My teaching became more elevated. My leading by example became more important than ever. I was going to tackle those difficult literature selections with my older kids, I was going to do those science experiments (so help me, on my best day, I am a garbage Science teacher, but I’m trying, darnit!), I was going to research those artists so I could present a solid picture of them and their works, I was going to reeducate myself in history and read greater works surrounding those historical events. I was going to be present for each question, not making them wait for me to finish responding to a post or watching some stranger’s hack on how to properly shoe a horse (don’t even pretend you haven’t come across a farrier video on socials. Sometimes the algorithm really gets you watching strange and far off things).  

And what about my little ones? I realized that I am in a strange era of life. One in which I am juggling puberty, but also nursing a baby and changing diapers. One where I am teaching one child how to apply makeup, and watching another child twirl in Disney princess dresses. While the Junior Highers and baby were getting a lot of attention, the middle littles were missing out on conscientious and intentional attention. I swapped notifications for nature walks, Reels for read alouds, and cleaning videos for cuddling. I responded to the little ones with greater interest because I had less to distract me. I had time to look at rolly polies, count stepping stones, and go on rabbit trails when studying mammals to find how whales nurse their young. (Did you know that a whale’s milk is the consistency of toothpaste?!)  When nursing my own baby, I had more time to eye gaze.

One unexpected and strange thing that occurred when I broke away from socials was how I interacted with my camera in regards to my children. This feels shameful and embarrassing to admit, but I’m already this far, so I’m just going to confess. I realized, without doing it intentionally, that many of the times I took pictures of my children, I was doing it with the filter of what I could show of them to other people. This may sound strange, and if I hadn’t discussed this strange phenomena with a couple of other people who also had this experience leaving social media, I might have thought it was just a me problem. It turned out it wasn’t. I stopped trying to get the perfect angle, the perfect lighting, the mess out of the background. I stopped taking pictures of literally EVERYTHING (more on that later), and started living in the moment a bit more. Sometimes I would go to grab my phone to take a picture and then consciously put it down to just live that moment with them “for real life”, as my 5 year old would say. The pictures in my camera roll now held only what I needed to enjoy for myself, with a sprinkling of things the grandparents would enjoy. This was freeing. 

I need to be accurate. Some of these things have been a gradual progression. Some of these things were overnight changes. And all of these things? All of these things have been done imperfectly. I can’t pretend that I always put my phone, my book, my kindle, or my dishwashing down to immediately respond and create a bonding moment with every child. I can’t pretend that I have turned into some Charlotte Mason, earth mother who has abolished all technology in favor of frolicking through the flowers with my gaggle of children. Oh, that I was that mother!

But since breaking up with the time sucking apps, I suddenly had more mental space for my children. I had less to distract me and keep me from the fleeting years of childhood that slip away like starchy pasta water through a colander. Gone in an instant leaving behind only a cloud of steam to remind us of the liquid that once was. 

So what else was there to fill my time now that I abandoned the feed and the people on the feed abandoned me?

(Stay tuned next week for Part 3!)

The Break Up: Part 1

Published on by R4 Comments

This is part one of a (hopefully?) five part series I’ve written on my break-up with social media. I hope you enjoy it. I hope that if you don’t enjoy it, you can make up that lost time with something better in the future.

When I was young, I remember wondering if a song I hummed or a poem I had written had ever been hummed or written before. I made up little stories, wondering if I was the first girl to have thought up that plot line. As I grew up, and gained more opinions and on deeper topics. In high school and college, I wrote papers and had new and fresh thoughts, I felt that again, that feeling of “I wonder if I’m the first to state these opinions in this way!” Then I aged more still, and the internet grew into a place for all people to share all their thoughts— constantly. I would read a blog, I would view a post, I would watch a video, and two things happened:

  1. I began to feel there was nothing original. Nothing new under the sun. My friend and I who always made that weird face at each other across a crowded room? That wasn’t unique to us. The interesting thoughts I had on politics? Other people had them, too. The cute thing my toddler said that I thought was something special? Yeah, you guessed it, a ton of other toddlers did the same thing.  
  2. I began to think my own thoughts a little less often. If my thoughts are not unique and we are all in the same globalist mush pot, what does thinking your own thoughts matter? A slow boil of others’ viewpoints surrounded me until I had marinated in those thoughts so much, so long, and so often, that they became my own.

But, then things got worse.  Eventually, I came into to descend into the lowest level of mindless consumption the internet had to offer: short form video content. Though I never joined the platform that started it all, TikTok, I gladly ate up Reels and Shorts: The junk food of the internet. I could consume, and consume, glut and bloat on hundreds of videos where everyone was like me. I would sit in bed, next to my husband. He with his Instagram Reels and a headphone in, me with my Reels and an earbud, and I would occasionally emit a blast of air through my nose that couldn’t even be called a full laugh, hit “share,” and send it to his Instagram with 3 laugh crying emojis  and the message “omg this is totally us” and so we would volley back and forth, back and forth. Sitting in bed next to each other, in the dark, letting out horse snorts, laughing when things were “just like us”.

And when I got to that lowest level of Dante’s Internetferno, where I had effectively taught the algorithm to give me countless mirrors of my own marriage, politics, parenting, friends, and life, I realized it was true: I had far less of a unique life and far less original thoughts than I thought I did. My life was just like everyone else’s (except those people have bigger houses and nicer cars). There was no point in sharing what I thought with anyone, because we were all the same. I felt I had probably not had an original thought in a long time. My brain was monotony.

And so? I decided to revolt. I couldn’t shut the internet down, I couldn’t run around like a mad woman telling everyone else to do so, so I did what I could for me. I rebelled and cut myself off. I would no longer participate in the mindless funnel I had been spiraling down. I would replace that time spent in an endless scroll of videos with better things. And frankly? It’s not hard to find something better, because nearly anything legal (and some things illegal) would still be better than the mindless scroll to which I had become addicted. 

I deleted my social apps. I deleted the time sucking apps. I stepped away and was ready to be my own person! I was an adult! I could refuse to be a part of the newsfeed! How hard could it be?

It is embarrassing to recall how many times I unlocked my phone to search for Facebook or Instagram. My fingers were like blind kittens looking for their mother’s milk. I was looking for that sweet little blast of dopamine. I would search the neat little grids on my phone, and remember I had deleted the apps and there was nothing for me there.

To what could I turn that would be as easily satisfying and gratifying as a new notification of a like, a message, someone sending me another video that was “just like us”? Nothing. What meal is as easily prepared as it would be to open a bag of Doritos? What dessert can be made as easily as ripping open a package of M&Ms? I realized, I couldn’t replace those “just like me” moments with something of equal low effort. 

I was no longer able to watch the hour by hour updates of my friends. I comforted myself: At least I had the numbers of many of those friends! And I had kept messenger as a way to keep in touch with friends without being bogged down by the scroll. Social media is about being social, we can be social apart from that! These people liked me, I liked them. They could no longer see my daily life, nor I theirs, but that didn’t mean we would lose touch! With no memes or videos to send, I checked in with friends and had to say something more in depth than a laughing emoji and “this is so us”.

Have you ever moved away and had friends promise to keep in touch with you or visit you, and then years later, no one has made the trek and most of them forget about you? That’s what happened. I moved away from socials, and all the people whose kids I have watched grow up, the acquaintances whom I had liked and hearted everything from their first sourdough to their 3rd marathon, the people who dropped comments on things I posted and sent me latent likes? They just disappeared into the ether.

I was actually shocked. Oh, sweet, naive Rachel. I had felt that I had more to bond myself with these social media friends! I thought we were closer than we were, because we interacted every day. Reading each other’s thoughts, looking at each other’s pictures, and finding our “just like me” similarities. It turns out, when you move away from socials, you are out of sight, and therefore out of mind. I can’t tell you how many friends I texted or messaged to let them know I was thinking of them or to ask for a life update and got either nothing or something that shut down the ability or need for further dialogue in response. I’ll admit it. I’m a total nostalgic sap and I really love people, so it actually hurt at first. But then I realized: this, too, was good for me! I needed to be broken of the “my friend on Facebook” way of thinking. Not everyone on social media was my actual friend. We were placed in the same social media soup at the same time, and that murky broth was the only thing binding us in the same bowl. We really had nothing of substance between us, and I needed to get it through my clingy, little homeschool kid soul, that being in the same soup does not a friend make. It takes hard work, love, accountability, care, concern, conflict, aggravation, frustration, and reconciliation to build true bonds. I still think about these people. Some of them were friends from childhood, some my adolescent years, others from mom groups with whom I had become “close”. These were once in person friends and these were always internet friends, and once I was no longer playing by the rules of Millennial online over sharing? I no longer existed. My phone grew quieter still.

(Stay tuned next week(ish?) for part 2!)