Reflections on Being One Month and Some Days Social Media Free

Jan 31, 2021

I logged out of and/or deactivated all my social media accounts on December 23rd. I told myself I’d do it for six months. Today, I am seven months sober and over a month social media free, excepting a small slip-up on Twitter on inauguration day.

It was over a year ago that I first deactivated for a month, after reading Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport while living in Czechia. I took a trip to Berlin without documenting it on any platforms. That felt freeing and profound— it was a wake up call. I hadn’t realized how much my social media performance of life influenced my actual life, and even though I logged back on after a month, I knew that quitting altogether was somewhere in my future.

I’ve had many people ask me why I quit social media, and for me the reasons are complicated and plentiful. It’s an awkward question to answer, similar to why did you quit drinking? The answer can often be received as a judgement on those who are still doing the thing I’ve decided not to do. I feel the urge to preface everything with there are a lot of things I like about social media in the same way I feel the need to preface my sobriety with It’s fine if other people drink. The truth is, my life is much better without alcohol, and my life is much better without social media.

There are a lot of good things about social media, I guess. That’s what I’m supposed to say, right? That there are a lot of good things about social media? When I say that, I am lying, because for me there were few good things about social media. I could connect with people. That was the only good thing for me, and I am learning that without social media I am still connecting with people, and yet my connections are much deeper, more intentional, and more fulfilling. I have time to connect with people in more meaningful ways. Was I really connecting with people on social media? Like, really? Really? My answer is, I don’t know. Kind of. No, not really. I was watching them, comparing myself to them, watching them watch and respond to me. We pumped each other up— social media interactions could be a burst of self-esteem or self-loathing, depending on the exchange.

I can think of some people I miss, it’s true. But if I had really connected with them (really), wouldn’t we be in contact? Or, I guess the more pertinent question is, what is my definition of connection? And does connection mean that one must be in contact forever?

Long ago, connection was spelled connexion, and it meant to bind, or tie together. the “x” transformed into two separate letters in the mid 18th century, but the meaning remained close to “circle of persons with whom one is brought into more or less intimate relations.” By this definition, I haven’t connected with many people on social media. Few intimate relations have been had, and I’m not implying romance by using the word intimate, but closeness. Almost all of my social media relationships can be defined as superficial, excepting the ones that stemmed from an in-person knowing.

So, what I’m saying is, the only thing I got from social media was customers. People who would take my proposal writing workshop (which I adored leading). The only reason I’ve stayed on social media is capitalism, despite the medium stealing my time from me by keeping me in a ludic loop, which is the same devilish mechanism that glues slot machine players to the hypnotizing bright lights and pinging sounds, hoping for another small win. The satisfaction and “connection” of tapping an empty heart on Insta and turning it red is the same as that alignment of images on the slot machine, accompanied by the dinging of manmade sounds. I used to think that tapping that heart on friends’ photos meant I was somehow supporting them, but truthfully, I was only temporarily satisfying a need for connection. The need, of course, wouldn’t disappear, but the satisfaction would, and quite quickly, because it was false, like the clothes the emperor wear. On social media I ate gobs and gobs of cotton candy when what I really needed was well-rounded meals.

I don’t miss it anymore. I don’t miss the way my very thoughts manicured themselves to be consumed, bite sized, on Twitter or Facebook or Insta. Even now, a month out, I notice how capitalism lives in my brain; how I mine my thoughts and ideas for little diamonds that can be shaped into something valuable enough to create income. It makes me sad that my entry point into publishing on the internet included selling short pieces about my trauma that shaved events down so they were consumable and half-cathartic but void of their real-life complexity. I often got paid $200, $300 for these pieces, money I really needed.

Without social media, I find myself examining my thought processes that were groomed, first by chat rooms and MySpace, and then by Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, as well as many forms of journalism that I now recognize as toxic. I hold them up to the light. I let them absorb the warmth of my own burgeoning self-acceptance. I hold the hope that, in a year or two, my writing won’t be aimed towards approval.

I watched this documentary about Tekashi 69, an artist I had no interest in but whose pathway to fame fascinates me. Take Tekashi out of the documentary and it’s really about social media: how shock value sells more than any talent or originality, how journalism and other mediums have, like star fuckers, become as obsessed with fame as the people they cover. They need clicks, and therefore they must have engaging titles and ledes— sometimes the titles and ledes are more important than the stories themselves. Even with my own lil’ newsletter I can tell which titles garner the most attention. It’s the ones that indicate something revealing.

I think something that gets left out of my awkward conversations about social media is this: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc. are all owned and operated by rich white men, as are Google, and any goodness we can squeeze out of them is purely from ourselves, our own goodness, and has nothing to do with the platform itself. The platforms are evil. Before evil meant sin it meant unskillful, defective, and that’s the meaning I’m gesturing towards. Why did I decide that these platforms, which mined my emotions and connections for personal information to sell to advertisers, deserved my time more than my actual friends and family, before the world, before my community? I dedicated hours a day to spacing out, tuning out, and dissociating. One cannot be fully present on social media. That’s not how it works. The mechanism is inherently dissociative. How else do we look onto a screen and glance up minutes later only to find it’s been an hour, and we’ve learned nothing. How often does it make us feel emptier, instead of full?

When this pandemic ends, can we all just quit social media?

I’ll tell you what’s happened inside me since leaving social media. It started as a small seed when I took that month off in Europe, and how grown into an open expanse inside me, full of possibilities that have everything to do with the beauty of every day, inside my own life. The ordinariness of it. I’ve asked myself, since leaving social media, what I want my life to be. What do I want to do, in my lifetime, which is so very short, a flash like lightning with no thunder when compared to our infinite universe. I grew up glued to the television, and when the internet arrived that averted my gaze, and when social media came I looked there, too, and what is life without that? I remember when I didn’t have a television. Can I cancel my Netflix, my HBO, and make my life quieter? The quiet feels so nice. The quiet feels so, so sad sometimes. I am reminded that life isn’t meant to be a succession of satisfactions— that I learned long ago how materialism doesn’t make me happy, but being inside myself and my own life, being present, is deeply satisfying. Here I am. Just me. Right here. Not needing to be anyone for anyone. Not needing to be a brand, project an image. Not locked into any identity. Mutable and everchanging.

When I was fourteen, after my mom married my stepdad, I was sent to summer camp. It was weird. I’d never been surrounded by people with so much privilege, but I found my people. I learned to love hiking, and the outdoors. Most profoundly, I spent a month without television. I’d spent almost my entire childhood as a latchkey kid, without siblings, and I watched television in the morning before going to school and in the afternoon when I got home. I was steeped in television. When I arrived home from summer camp the first thing my mom did was turn on the TV, and as usual we all sat on the couch and watched it. But something inside me had changed, and television felt wrong. Like, truly wrong. Wait, I thought; these commercials are bullshit. They’re trying to get me to feel a certain way. The news felt strange and far away.

It was as if summer camp had deprogrammed me.

Of course, I kept watching TV. But it started feeling different. American television, and the cultural norms it brought to me, both damaged me and expanded my world. Both things.

This week:

I watched this recording of a B.K.S. Iyengar yoga demonstration at the Barbican, which I was ambivalent about at first but then really loved.
In my yoga training I’ve been thinking and reading a lot about conspirituality, cultural appropriation, and whiteness in yoga, as well as trauma informed practices. It’s a lot, let me tell you. As someone raised by an ex-Scientologist and a Buddhist, I have been examining my own complicity and experiencing a lot of small shifts around new age spirituality. My mom was adversely affected by the Law of Attraction and I have long had a viscerally negative reaction to the concept of “manifesting,” which is deeply steeped in privilege and oriented towards gaining wealth. It’s all about capitalism, essentially. The new age world overlaps with the yoga world, and all of it is rife with abuse. I’m beginning to wonder where there isn’t abuse. The power dynamics of capitalism make it so easy to be exploited and be the exploiter, depending on what you have or don’t have.
This week I watched A Teacher on Hulu. It’s a miniseries about a predatory teacher, and does a good job of laying out the intricacies of predatory behavior. It’s not a perfect show, but it definitely hit me hard, especially at the end.
I loved this beautiful and sad video of the Siekopi people of Ecuador finding help for Covid-19 in their traditional remedies. What an immense wealth of knowledge these people hold, and how terrible that their land is being encroached upon by colonization to support the lives of others (like us) who need to have all the modern luxuries. I guess I’m on a “capitalism is evil” kick this week, but when am I not?
Here’s Amy Sedaris’s Greenwich Village apartment. I want to live here? The gingham, the wallpaper, the curtains and the paper roses. I love it. It gives me permission to make my apartment as wacky as I want. After watching, I found this tutorial on how to make paper roses, which I think I’ll string up in my own apartment.
I’m a big fan of E.L. Doctorow and adored this piece about him and his student.
I’ve become overwhelmed by my library holds (especially given that I am reading so much content for my yoga training) and have decided to focus on reading all the books I own that I, ahem, haven’t read. I’m starting with Jenny Offill’s Weather. Jenny was a guest teacher at my MFA program while I was there and she’s an incredible writer.
I’ll be honest; I watched Bachelor in Paradise. I’ve never been a fan of the Bachelor franchise but sometimes I watch things because I want to know why other people watch things. My conclusion is that BiP is basically like mashing Barbie and Ken dolls together for several hours, with a tropical backdrop.

Alrighty, that’s all I have to say this week. Please comment. Please share if you feel inclined! I love you!

Stacy

Reflections on Being One Month and Some Days Social Media Free

This week:

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