Who Else is Bored with Social Media?
When social media started, it was the perfect opportunity to connect with friends we’d lost through traditional mail and phone channels. It became an opportunity to reconnect and share our lives with the people who have meant something to us. We were excited, we reconnected, met new friends, and felt a belonging to a global platform. We were connected with everyone and everything.
Then businesses and spammers jumped on.
The landscape on our feeds is so far from what it was initially that it’s hard to find our friends’ news anymore. I acknowledge that I have been part of the noise with my contributions on my author page, and I, too, have dived into the “marketing strategies” for social media courses, and to be brutally honest, it never felt right. At times, it felt like I was manipulating my nearest and dearest. It didn’t sit well with me.
Over the past 12 months, I’ve been spending less time on the big two, Facebook and Instagram. I have no desire to share anymore and even less desire to wade through pages and pages of rubbish to find my friends. But the consequence of turning off my apps has been nothing less than transformational. I don’t fear or feel any FOMO (fear of missing out), but even more than that, I have almost zero desire to share what’s going on in my life with anyone that’s not in my inner circle. It feels a bit, in a way, like instead of spreading myself all over the internet, I’m keeping myself closer. And in a time where businesses are encouraged to use social media as a tool for promotion, it’s a tricky balance when you have a business, as I do, where my brand IS my name.
I remember seeing an episode of Black Mirror where, after her husband dies, the protagonist orders an AI version of her husband, but while he looks like her husband, he doesn’t have any depth of their moments of intimacy, of the things that they didn’t share on social media. Those moments, those little precious memories, they don’t need sharing. In the time of social media, AI, and instability, NOT SHARING our personal lives is a radical act of self-preservation and protection.
“I know friends are moving over to other platforms, but it doesn’t matter who owns it, or the motivation behind the app, social media apps suck life from us. You want to connect with me, for real, pick up the phone or email, or better yet, write me a good old-fashioned letter!”
In the beginning, we got to live vicariously through other people’s lives and celebrate fantastic coffee art or meals, a new child, travel, and increasingly their health challenges, and those things are still there - buried under sponsored ads, corporate advertising, and spam…oh, so much spam. I jump on the desktop to check, and I’m bored within 30 seconds now. I’ve got better things to do than waste hours of my one, wild and precious life scrolling through meaningless things that don’t add anything of value to my life. And those hours of scrolling add up to days or weeks of our life.
I’ve lived more life than I have left, and I certainly don’t want to waste what I have left in meaninglessness - I want to live it with meaning, purpose, and with real-life connections - not a thumbs-up, or heart on a post (while they are appreciated, they are fleeting), they aren’t nourishing or sustainable. I have books I want to write, projects I want to create, an abundance of research and learning I want to do, and I want deep and meaningful relationships with people in person, and if we can’t be in the same geography, we do more than “like” posts! I don’t want to be mind-numbed anymore. I want wholesome content, I want to read books and blogs slowly, and live a life of purpose and meaning, not escape.
I don’t want to compete with other people on the internet, nor do I want them to feel like they are competing with me. I’m happy to inspire others, but not make people fall into a pit of comparisonitis. There’s so much evidence that the toxicity of social media is worse than the benefits, and without getting too deep into the owners of the platforms and their lack of morals, it’s easier to walk away from it than ever in the past 20 years. We have been guinea pigs in this social experiment since 2004, and I no longer want to be the “product” for them. I’m opting out of the experiment as much as I can. I know friends are moving over to other platforms, but it doesn’t matter who owns it, or the motivation behind the app, social media apps suck life from us. You want to connect with me, for real, pick up the phone to call or email, or text, or better yet, write me a good old-fashioned letter!
*The irony of a post sharing personal details about not sharing personal details on a social platform is not lost on me!
