The social media hiatus is … possibly ending.

My reflections on the month of January through the challenges of reducing my reliance on social media.

The last month has been one of learning, about understanding more about the things that drain me, leaving me in a strange state of tension. Alongside this I learned a lot about what can be good about stepping away from social media. Rather than jumping back on the train I’ve decided to limit the process, using the first few days of February to challenge my own assumptions of what being on social media does, personally and professionally.

I need to spend more time in places like this, inspired by the Antony Gormley sculpture ‘Grip’ at Saddell

So, to summarise…

The good…

The extra time I had given myself felt magical, no doubt helped by having a long holiday in the first weeks of January. I had more thinking space, I could ponder on the things that I enjoy thinking about, my inspirations, my research, my daily creative activities.

Space in my head was a real surprise in the first days of no social media, my wake-up routine was quicker, I didn’t feel dejected as I am prone to do. I saw this benefit as occurring because I wasn’t instantly diving into other worlds, I was entrenched in my own. It shows that on those down days, spending some time on social media does the opposite, filling space with the algorithm, leaving no space to simply be.

Substack acted as a tiny dose of social time, reading genuine stories, commenting on humour, reality, human experience, and mostly realising that the ‘media’ might be part of the problem. The decorum of Substack felt good, considered and with meaning.

The bad…

I’m not sure I experienced FOMO* per se, but I was destabilised by not immersing myself in the process of engaging online. I think spending time on social media had become a crutch, something to help me deal with the everyday. Not being on there all the time really brought it home that I needed to be in the now, not in the over there, if I wanted to spend life less anxiously.

* Fear of missing out

I struggled with my emotions at times, in the form of anger at myself for being so addicted to something that I knew didn’t do me much good. It is testament to how accurate the algorithms are at working out what we need/want to see. I had a strange sensation of Pavlov’s dog, a thought getting me onto the app and then the system doing the rest. What if I could avoid the click?

The ugly…

I found a workaround in YouTube which quickly got me back in. My first negative day in January was on the second day of realising that I could watch videos that are normally found on Instagram there. The drop in my mood was almost immediate and it took a couple of days before I managed to delete the app, it left a hole that I’ve had to work at fixing.

Do I even use Instagram for what I should be doing? I do post on the app, with clear lines of the narratives I want to talk about, that is what I should be doing. I realised however that my tendency was to go to the search tab because that was ‘where the good stuff’ was. This means that I’m not spending time looking at artists, writers and photographers work, a bit of a cheek when people followed me for mine.

Addiction of another kind, I’m now looking for the next generation of digital simplification, weighing up if I could get away with a feature phone or reduce the smartness of my current one. Do I really need my phone to tell me how to get to the studio, or to my friends? The mind boggles sometimes, hopefully this one will fade away into the ether.

Next steps

I’m going to write something like ‘The digital readjustment takes shape’ that focuses on some of the words that exemplify how I view the month, I’m intrigued to see if the list is entirely new, or if it’s an evolution of the previous article. Either way I can’t see myself fully immersing in social media for a while.

Let me know what you think about the line between life and social media!