Notes from a Social Media Fast

 "A luxury, once enjoyed, becomes a necessity." ~C Northcote Parkinson

I remember the days before the the reign of the Internet, I swear I do. I remember looking up facts in dictionaries and encyclopedias, and inviting friends to birthday parties via physical letters, and getting lost all the time because we didn't have GPS. 

I remember when social media lived on a computer— a honkin' desktop computer that the whole family shared— and was hidden behind the torturously slow and noisy boot-up of dial-up Internet, which, of course, you could only use if no one was on the phone. I remember reading an entire act of Macbeth while waiting for Myspace profile page to load. 

I was already married when I got my first smartphone, and my current phone is so old that it only has room for about three apps.

So you'd think that cutting back social media to 15 minutes a day would not be a big deal for me.

Alas.

(Cue sad trombone music.)

I decided to cut back for my fast during the season of Lent, a 40-day period before Easter. In the past I've given up dessert, but this year I was keenly aware that I'd become addicted to the notifications and the siren song of scrolling, and so it seemed like a natural choice.

I chose to cut back rather than cut off because I wanted to continue sharing my art/writing and keep up with my Gothic lit book clubs on Tumblr, and to use Facebook as a communication tool. At the last minute I decided I was going to take the plunge and host a poetry challenge in the month of March— during a social media fast was not the best time to make it mandatory for me to show up on Facebook first thing in the morning, but I'd put off hosting the challenge for three months already, so I decided to just take the plunge. It turns out that 15 minutes is about enough time to post my poem, read other's poems, respond to comments, and frantically scroll through Tumblr posts for about 5 minutes. 

Knowing that I'd be tempted at every opportunity, I set to work preparing my environment for success. I deleted the Tumblr app from my phone, moved my email app to a secondary screen, set up all the blogs I follow in my Feedly app, and checked out a ton of books from the library. I also got some art projects set up. So when boredom struck and I had a moment of free time, I grabbed a book, my crochet project, my mending pile, my sketch pad, or even my phone to read the longer-form blog posts that I'd gotten wildly behind on. 

Turns out that social media as a boredom or filler tool was pretty easy to give up. After all, there are lots of other pleasant distractions. What I didn't realize is how much empty mental space it would leave me… and how uncomfortable I was with that emptiness.

I'm done with the fast now, although I've decided to keep some of the restrictions, such as not checking social media (or email) first thing in the morning or late at night and only using social media in desktop (not mobile) versions. (I think I might also follow my Lenten pattern of not going on social media at all on my Sunday-Monday weekends.) 

Here are some thoughts from my 40 days with limited social media:

1. For me, social media is addictive mostly because it's comforting.

Those who know me know that I struggle with anxiety. In fact, for the past several days, I've felt under near-constant assault from my brain, telling me that every bad thing that's happening is the end of the world. Social media can cause anxiety too, but more often than not, it's a high-dopamine activity: notifications and nice comments hit my brain like a drug, the posts are short and easy to digest, and it's very stimulating without requiring anything emotionally of me.

It also eases loneliness. By many people's opinions, it is "fake community," and there is merit in that, but sometimes I just. Can't. Be. With. People. And yet I feel so lonely that I'm going to burst. My days without social media felt empty and restless, and yet what I was longing for was not an in-person social interaction but a pleasant online communal interaction, one that didn't require a huge effort of social energy. I'm still trying to figure out how I feel about it.

2. I reflected a lot on what makes an activity "meaningful."

In the mornings, instead of scrolling on my phone, I would sit across from Zach while he ate breakfast and work on crocheting a rug. I got a lot done, and the rug is almost finished. It's satisfying to make something like that, but is it really more valuable than social media? Is reading a floofy book about home organizing inherently better than reading Gothic lit headcanons on Tumblr? If the goal of something is to relax and have fun, why is any sort of consuming more valuable than social media? 

3. I came to appreciate social media a lot more.

Sometimes when I fast from something, I realize that I really didn't need it. And no, I don't "need" social media. But I missed it not just out of some addiction-crazed state but because I genuinely missed engaging in the community, particularly on Tumblr. I learned to appreciate it for what it is, and to use that appreciation to guide me in how I interact with it.

4. HOLY COW do I spend a lot of time on the internet.

As I read through book after book, drew a lot more, and wrote a lot more, I realized how much time I spend scrolling— it was sobering and stunning. As mentioned above, I've tried to put some boundaries in place to help me avoid going down the time-suck route (deleting the mobile apps will probably help more than anything with that), but it'll take me a little while to balance out again.

~

In short, I'm really glad I backed off on social media and gained a bit of perspective from it— it's worth examining anything we do that takes up a lot of time in our day and see whether devoting so much time to it is really worth it. But I'm also really glad to be back, engaging more, scrolling more, and generally participating in the community again.

~~~