Why I Left Social Media

I was face down in my phone messaging someone on Facebook when my daughter asked for help with her homework. Without looking up I said, “gimme a few minutes.”  At the moment, it seemed like what I was doing was super important.  Someone on Facebook had messaged me about a problem they were having with their chickens, and I was asking for pics and descriptions, trying to diagnose the problem.  

The real problem was I didn’t even know this person.  I prioritized helping them with their chicken problem of birds dropping dead (which as usual boiled down to improper coop maintenance) over helping my here and now very own flesh and blood daughter with her math homework.  And this was not a one off, as I felt the need to keep up with the comments and connections for my farm page so that I can be “successful.”   

How did someone I’ve never even met, who doesn’t have the common sense to regularly clean out a chicken coop end up taking priority?  And when I’m 80 and looking back, am I going to remember how great it was to message a stranger that chickens need a clean place to live?  Or that I helped my youngest daughter navigate fractions and she figured it out?

Don’t get me wrong, there are upsides to open lines of connection to such a vast number of people when you need to sell some goat cheese, but a major downside is when they begin to inch in and take priority over the actual people right in front of you, especially family members.  I’m easily sucked into the scroll, the lure of connection that is false.  At the end of the day, I wish I’d captured all those missed moments of connection with my girls. 

All too soon I’ll be nostalgic over their lost childhood as I am already about their infant and toddler years.  Time marches on.  They will fly our coop before we know it, and I will miss this.  The homework, the conversations about nothing in particular, the opportunity to join them on a walk or just sit and be with them.

And so, I left all of social media.  One day, I looked at my screen time spent on social media and realized I would trade every damn second of it to spend it in the present with my people and myself.  If my people aren’t around, I’d rather spend that time reading, napping, staring at the clouds in the sky.  I politely decline getting wrapped into scrolling curated posts, false dramas, and fed upsetting scenarios that are way outside my circle of influence. 

Most of all, I decline the distraction from the most important people in my life and the present.

It has been so freeing.  I have a huge amount of mental space and clarity I didn’t realize was being usurped by social media.  I have more decision space for myself, less practice in casting judgement on others, and best of all, more face time with my people.  More time in the present.  

The funny thing is, all those followers never really noticed.  No one reached out, their feed just filled with something else.  Which rather solidified that fact that all of those connections were, well, fake.  They didn’t warrant my tending or my attention.

The connections I tend today are the real ones, my family and the handful of real friends in my life that bring me joy.  And it’s fabulous.