Strawberry pies & living at the speed of social media
If listening to someone talk about their relationship with social media sounds about as boring to you as listening to someone share their grocery list, this isn’t for you.
I want to notice hydrangeas and ladybugs and make strawberry pies.
I’ve been making room in my life to pay more attention to beauty and creativity and relationship, and in that making room, I’ve found I’ve had to let some things go.
Most especially: my false sense of urgency.
That feeling that makes me believe it’s important that I get the dishes done quickly (for what purpose?) or get dressed and put my makeup on quickly in the mornings (why? what does the speed accomplish exactly?).
I’m sharing my thoughts right now on my relationship with social media specifically. If listening to someone talk about their relationship with social media sounds about as boring to you as listening to someone share their grocery list, here’s your chance to hop out.
I’ve come to the end of the idea that I have to have the right opinion on everything.
I don’t any longer believe there is a right opinion on everything.
I still believe in truth, because there is a God who created the world and truth is not something that can be changed or is different from person to person; there is no “my truth” and “your truth” there is only the truth.
But truth existing does not then mean there is only one right way of living in the world or making decisions for yourself.
Some things in this life are flexible and personal and have to be decided with your own conscience. This is one of those things for me.
As I share how I came to my decision to leave social media, please know this is not an argument to try to compel you into getting rid of your social media.
These are just my complicated (and valid) reasons for personally leaving, explained so I can understand it all myself and share it with those who are curious and actually want to hear.
I need to fix my meaning to the page so I can remember when my remembering gets thin.
Hurried is the state of my family of origin. The home I grew up in was always in a state of hurry. Everything needs to be done promptly, finished quickly, move on the next thing, get to the exact point, now. Long paragraphs should be condensed into short sentences for the sake of everyone involved.
I’m not pointing this out negatively, in fact, if you asked my parents they would still be proud of this. Their efficiencies and consideration of peoples time and busyness is something they value.
I’m finding as I near 30 and I’m raising my own kids, that there are parts of my family I do and don’t want to pass down. Efficient living, specifically at the cost of living more presently and connected in my real life, is not a way I want to live, or pass down to my children.
I don’t want to be remembered as efficient.
My new awareness of my rushing through my days has awakened my desire to stop it and live at a truly human pace. The pace of conversation. The pace of walking. The pace of raising children in a connected household full of peace and joy. And social media has not been supportive of those values for me at this time.
Hear me out, I’m not here to shit-talk tech and the gifts its given the world. I am thankful to live in 2023 with all it’s opportunities and online possibilities. This is just a peek into my a personal war for balance.
This feels like one of those complicated love stories where there really isn’t a good guy or a bad guy. Life is too complex for that black and white retelling.
My phone and social media aren’t a bad guy and me a victim. But we have been in relationship for more than half my life and we keep trying to make it work, foster a healthy relationship, but it feels like I realized a long time ago this wasn’t working for me, and I’ve been forcing and faking it ever since. Everyone else makes it work, why can’t I? What exactly is wrong with me?
There’s a constant, magnetic draw to social media.
And it doesn’t better my life in any meaningful ways that I can see right now.
Every time I’ve wanted to be off, or gotten off—which has been often—I think of 1000 very useful ways I can use social media to enhance my family’s life. So I give it another go.
And then… I don’t consistently use social media for those things. Or find those things don’t accomplish what I hoped they would for me.
My ideas around productivity and abundance offered in my virtual parallel universe are more abounding than the actual productivity and abundance in my online worlds.
Kind of like I did with alcohol, I set boundaries, I’d set rules for how I’d use social media and it’d work for a while, sometimes really well even… and then something would knock me off and I’d be back to ways of living that didn’t feel good.
When I am on social media, I am tempted to do things for quick results. The entire point of the platform is it’s speed. It creates faster living, faster connecting, faster creating, and the algorithm rewards only fast, fast, fast, more, more, more.
When I realized I wanted to stop producing and living at the speed of social media, I stopped showing up in the same ways. I didn’t contribute to the machine like I had been.
But I found, even when I stopped contributing to the monster of speed by sharing my life daily, I was still a part of the problem.
I was still a consumer of the fast fast fast, more more more content the algorithm passed my way.
This negatively affects me. It turns the volume down on my life and up on this virtual parallel universe.
We’re all so busy making avatars of ourselves online, can it even be real? Can we even be real when we’re only a sliver of ourselves? Everyone’s “niching down” and “adding value”.
But then… to be real, do we have to show all the nuances and ups and downs in our lives? If being real is tied up in sharing the intricacies, the lows alongside the highs, then that means having to let people virtually peer into private moments: do I want that?
I hate the unknown and unseen, all powerful, algorithm. The ultimate decider of whose lives I’m seeing and interacting with, the content that shapes my days by filling my thoughts.
The algorithm took friendship out of social media and tied up connection with popularity. I hate that there have been moments where I’ve been strategic about relationships instead of letting them happen as they naturally and honestly would.
I’ve said out loud, Instagram is so good for connection and relationship, as I post another story and ignore, once again, the 30 text messages from actual real life friends.
So the question comes up…
What is relationship?
Is knowing what my friend had for lunch relationship, if I haven’t talked to her personally in three months?
It seems that over the years our relationship with people turned into a relationship with Instagram.
And it’s now those relationships we each have personally with Instagram that interact with each other.
I’ve always been a performer (and I don’t say that positively). It has often felt like I’m performing my life instead of living it. Instagram only enhances that weird internal disconnection that I’ve been working to heal.
I don’t want a performance of my life to interact with the performances of other peoples lives.
I want to live more in my real, gritty, flesh and bones life, and see my people in theirs too. I don’t want to know my friends just for their best captions, funniest moments, most photographable memories, inspiring reels, or most thoughtful anecdotes. I want to know them in the context of their natural lives, where they have laundry and brush their teeth and have to stop to eat meals.
And as I learn to honor the seasons of my life, I’ve also realized the beauty in letting relationships come and go as they are supposed to.
Social media puts relationships on life-support, holding onto them for a longer than they should be held onto when the right thing to do would be to let them pass into memory. (Beautiful memory, or sometimes pained memory.)
People naturally come in and go out of our lives, but social media requires you to make decisions like: “Am I going to unfollow this person? Am I going to unfriend them?” And that feels yuck.
I don’t want my social media to be a running list of every person I’ve ever met, but I also don’t want to constantly make decisions like cutting someone out in the weird and complex digital universe. I want to enjoy the benefit of the natural world and it’s constant flux, instead of letting such complicated energy take space in my body and force me into decisions. (Or the decision of indecision.)
I dislike that the algorithm presents me with the most interacted with posts, rewarding extremism on all sides. I want to be ready to learn and change, which isn’t easy when you’re constantly consuming or taking extreme stances on things, or are stuck in an echo chamber.
And I hate that I’ve been conditioned to believe people who have things worth listening to are going to have huge followings.
I have measured peoples worth according to the amount of followers they have.
I hate that a number assigned near someone’s name make them appear trustworthy or expert on things that they aren’t necessarily trustworthy or expert in. I hate that I’ve found myself respecting more the words from people with large audiences than those with small audiences.
It’s wrong that how important or valued what you’re saying is has become directly related to the number of followers you have.
I don’t mind being judged for what I’m doing, when the judging comes from close examination and consideration in the context of my work or living. But Instagram is a place of casual judgement.
It’s one thing to be ranked for a business, or an idea, or a piece of creativity.
But to be ranked…
Just as a person.
By an algorithm, kind of arbitrarily.
And then by people for a number…
Feels wrong.
It takes away a bit of our personhood.
I don’t want to invent myself in the face of casual judgement.
Social media has shown me some of my own ugliness.
I’ve mined my own life for content when I could just be living it.
I wrote recently about the quiet becoming content. How it’s not really quiet when it’s content.
It’s interesting to me that there’s a big boom in desire for this type of real life, dirty hands in the kitchen, digging in the garden, making-a-home lifestyle content. Many, many women are flocking to accounts that promote being barefoot outdoors, journaling, homemaking, writing, the quiet, the beautiful…. But it’s… in its own existence, just a performance of that quiet… an example of what that quiet would be, if it wasn’t being filmed for story or reels.
We’re watching people showing what it would be to live quiet happy lives, because that’s what we desire, but that’s not really what it is if it’s being filmed, and it’s not what we actually have when we keep turning to the our devices for that feeling.
This is all a bit confusing, because when you’re on social media you feel good.
It feels fun.
But then…
As a whole.
It doesn’t.
It feels wrong.
There’s that nagging feeling that it’s bigger and more important than it appears when you’re in the moment enjoying yourself.
This is so much like my story with alcohol it’s hard not see parallels the whole way through. This is why I believe this is too personal and complex to say there’s a right way for everyone.
Even if I was conservative, only spending 10 minutes a day on social media, wouldn’t I be happier in the long run if I spent that time doing something else, like practicing piano? Learning French? Reading a book in the sunshine? Talking to a friend? Even just taking a nap? (Lol, no naps are being taken here since there’s always one child up…)
Or what if I could just once again, daydream.
Or learn how to make the best cup of tea ever.
Realizing I was really ready to leave social media, not just delete the apps, but remove myself and my history from those places, I was surprised by what came up for me… the question I felt pop up…
Do I really believe I am meaningful or what I’m doing is meaningful without a social media presence?
Do I even exist if I’m not on Instagram?
In the strangest way it felt like confronting my own mortality: will I be remembered? Am I worth being remembered?
It seems like such a silly question, especially considering I was off most of this year so far anyway, but it’s a question that appeared nonetheless as I hovered my finger over the deactivate account button.
Something about not having a history for people to casually scroll through made me feel like I’d disappear. I honestly, genuinely did not know that I had those kinds of questions or feelings until I got to that moment of deleting myself from social media.
With all of this being considered, I also had to ask myself, why write? Why podcast? Why be online at all? Are all the downsides of Instagram just downsides of the internet as a whole? In some ways, yes. But in the important ways, the downsides of Instagram that made it finally worth leaving, aren’t apparent right now in the other places I am online.
Theres no immediate feedback loop with my writing and podcasting. There aren’t likes and shares and pats on the back like Instagram. There’s not checking my story view count and getting a sense of self worth from it. There is no public following number that makes me seem more or less trustworthy to whoever stumbles upon my writing.
And here there’s a sense I’m writing and sharing for myself, my future self, my memory, my children and grandchildren someday, if they want to dig in to the archives and see who I was on this path of becoming.
The place I spent the most time on Instagram was in stories. And all of those stories… disappeared. That’s what they’re created to do. Gone in 24 hours. It feels like such a waste to spend any time of my day documenting my life in a way that I won’t be able to come back and look through with my children. At least not easily. It’s not created for that. The storyteller in me wants to keep our stories, and I have to do that in a place created for that purpose.
It also feels like my website and my podcast happen in my own space, and in the context of who I am and my writing history. I don’t have to surrender my context to the platform.
It’s true that without inserting myself into peoples lives via Instagram, my reach is likely to always be smaller, but I know with certainty I’d rather deeply reach a small number of people then reach everybody shallowly.
There will forever be, for as long as the internet exists, social media for people to use to connect and create and all the good things, as well as all the bad.
I know if I ever want to go back, the door is always unlocked for me. But for now, I want to experience my life without the extra noise, and I want to see myself succeed in building the life I want, and future businesses I want, without using socials as my platform to do so. We’ll see how it goes, I guess.