There are a handful of things I feel quite strongly about. One is the importance of pursuing your own wants and needs independent of your kids and the other is silencing outside noise and influences so that you can actually hear yourself think, in order to better understand what your wants and needs might actually be.
I most certainly did not always feel this way, but after my own experience giving up my career to be more available for my kids I found myself completely lost. Three years ago, I set out to connect the dots between life and work and motherhood and it was my sincere hope that my business would be part of the solution for women who felt torn between pursuing work in the midst of motherhood. I started my instagram account as a way to document the creation of my business and the reclamation of myself from start to finish (and well, that business is truly finished while I am still very much a work in progress).
I never could’ve imagine the ups and downs I would experience both in real life and in those tiny instagram squares, but I continued to show up and document the journey in hopes that someone somewhere might feel less alone. In sharing my story, I hoped that I could give other women permission to pursue the life they envisioned for themselves, not in spite of but because of their kids.
After years of showing up online, I found myself deeply uninspired by the same voices and the same highlight reel day in and day out. The more I showed up online, the more disconnected I felt from the same life I was so freely sharing, the same life I was so freely giving away. The more I connected to the phone in my hand, the more disconnected I felt from the life that was right in front of me. Last summer, I recognized a deep desire to take a break from social media and what started out as a small summer hiatus quickly became a lifeline I didn’t know I needed.
During my time away something changed, well lots of things changed. As the weeks flew by, I found myself more and more connected to my real life and less and less interested in what might be happening online. The less I focused on the screen in my hand, the more I focused on the moments right in front of me. The less time I spent chatting via DM, the more time I spent phoning and texting and visiting with real life friends. The more time I spent offline, the less I cared about those tiny squares and reluctantly returning felt like a punch to the gut and a video induced panic attack. As I prioritized my real life over all else, I realized the ‘else’ didn’t matter much. With time, my desire to share my life online faded.
With time, my desire to share my life online faded.
Plenty of people have expressed their distain for instagram, but it has also ‘made’ many of us and letting go isn’t exactly easy. Somewhat torn between what it would mean for my business to leave the platform behind, I told myself I could return at any time. But I have spent the past 6 months building a life that feels better than it looks and quitting instagram ended up being one of my biggest ‘accomplishments’ of 2022.
My time away solidified my conclusion that life is best lived offline. Which leaves me at a crossroads, building a business without the added benefit of online marketing means starting over completely. I continue to remind myself that the energy drain from creating an ‘online life’ is a far greater cost than any business I might receive.
Since logging off I have been inundated with feedback from friends and from the internet which further solidify my decision to leave the land of likes and algorithms behind.
A friend recently forwarded me an article written by Sara Petersen
and very single word resonated. Here are the main takeaways from her article:“Life lived off of social media (by which I mean real life) is less frenetic; it is smaller, quieter. Less of my headspace is used up considering how to phrase something or how to crop something or whether or not something is witty or whether or not something is appropriately sincere. Less of my concentration is frittered away on checking, checking, checking to see how many hearts have piled up.”
“I should say that no part of me misses social media when I take these breaks. We all collectively acknowledge how social media provides fleeting moments of validation, but I do not miss being validated in such a way.”
“As I opened up Instagram and took stock of the number of hearts and messages, I felt something sludgy rise up in my gut and into my chest. I felt my energy drain. I felt physically dispirited.”
“So many people’s stories waiting to be viewed. So many people’s lives waiting to be consumed. It’s hard to describe why it made me so blue, but the inexorableness of it all knocked the wind out of me. No matter how many breaks I take, all the noise, the consumption, the output, the input, it will keep going on and on and on and on. So much energy expended from so many individuals being poured into - what?”
Read the entire article here…
Another article that peeked my interest was written by Hamish McKenzie, the co-founder of Substack - the app upon which I have been writing these words. He writes about Twitter which is another hot topic ever since the Musk takeover. So much of his perspective mimics my sentiments on Instagram and Social Media in general. Here are the main takeaways from his article:
“While we are convincing ourselves that we’re participating in discourse in the public square, we are actually in a cage, making a spectacle of ourselves for little more than weak dopamine hits and pretend friends.”
“When you publish your thoughts on twitter (or instagram or tiktok) you are doing the labor for that company, you are the product, not the customer.”
“Twitter (and instagram and tiktok) need your mind so that it can satisfy its real customers: advertisers. The machine decides who sees your posts and what gets amplified.”
Read the entire article here…
Which leads me here, sharing my words and trusting that they will find the person or people who need them most. I write in order to make sense of the world through words. I no longer need an algorithm or a handful of hearts to validate me and my desire to share my work and my words.
Why are we selling ourselves for a search engine? Why are we limiting ourselves and sharing what the algorithm wants to see or hear instead of staying true to ourselves? Why are we all so focused on building our online lives instead of living our real ones?
I share this not to tell you what to do, but to encourage you to ask yourself if social media is adding or subtracting from your life, from your work, from your relationships. If social media is your thing and you love building your online life then by all means keep going, but if you feel yourself depleted or frustrated or overwhelmed by the never ending highlight reel then maybe it is time to re-evaluate your relationship with that portion of your life. Maybe it is time for a small break, maybe it is time to quiet the noise, maybe it is time to put down your phone and pick up your life.
Have you ever taken a social media break? If so, I want to hear from you. Hit reply and share your own social media story with me.