The Social Media Experiment Revisited

A year away from socials complete - what now?

On November 30, 2023, I quit Instagram and Facebook and started this Substack. I planned to stay off socials (excluding Goodreads and Substack, which itself has become a form of social media.. more on that below) for a calendar year. This is a bit of what I said about it at the time:

“I don’t like admitting it, but I am susceptible to hours of Instagram scrolling a day. I get on there to ‘check something’ and before I know it, I’ve spent a half hour scrolling. When I look at my life, full of little people and not-so-little-anymore people, I just can’t justify spending that kind of time and mental space on my phone.”

My plan was to post a once-monthly journal/newsletter to make space for reflection and keep folks like you updated on our family life. I kept up with that and managed to write a post each month with reflections from our life and whatever was rolling around in my rock tumbler of a brain. I appreciate all of you who click through and read each month from near and far. It gives me some of those warm fuzzies from the early days of blogging and online connecting.

Photo by Gilles Lambert on Unsplash

A few things I’ve learned this year:

1. Getting off social media helps with phone addiction, but doesn’t solve it completely. No one will be shocked to know that I still find ways to waste time scrolling on my phone. My brain still wants to get a little hit of dopamine from that hunk of metal in my pocket. I often find myself needing to delete apps like Goodreads and Substack, which have endless-scroll newsfeeds. I still scroll my texts and email. I went through a few phases of using the LTK app for wardrobe recs but it was too similar to the influence of Instagram. For me, getting off of socials helped considerably with staying off my phone, but it wasn’t a cure-all.

2. Being off socials helps with comparison and consumerism. I didn’t realize how many things I wanted and/or purchased because I saw them online. Getting off Instagram and Facebook, deleting LTK, and even unsubscribing from email ads helped me a lot with this. Sometimes I also needed to delete the Amazon and Target apps — I can get on there to order some diapers and be lost on my wishlist half an hour later. Again, not a cure-all, as our society is built around consumerism and we actually do need material things to navigate life, but a help in lowering my desire for stuff I don’t need.

3. Getting off socials is sometimes lonely, but not too much. This is my personal experience, so take it with a grain, but I found I didn’t miss too much. Sure, I didn’t know about pregnancies until I saw the bellies in real life and I didn’t hear about a few friends’ moves, but I got all the important info in real life or through text messages. There were a few times where people were talking about a post they had seen or a news story I missed and I needed caught up, but not many. The thing I think I missed the most was seeing people’s pictures on special occasions, but I learned to just text friends and ask for them.

4. You do gain more time, but you might need some help filling it at first. Socials can leave a big hole in your time and make you feel disconnected at first. I find it helpful to pick up a new hobby or dive into a book if I’m feeling squirrelly. Do one of those things you feel like you never have time to do! Include a friend if you can. I also find that sometimes putting on some music helps at first to ease you out of the “mental noise” of online life. Real life can seem kind of quiet if you haven’t hung out there in a while.

5. Sometimes, you need more than your own self-control. As I said above, I found some other ways to exert my desire to scroll outside of Insta/FB that were still unhealthy. I purchased a Brick to help me put my phone down more and I’ve found it to be a great tool. It blocks all the distracting apps you don’t want and essentially turns your phone into a dumb phone. It really gives you that vintage feel of not being available every second of every day. Big fan.

So will I ever return to Instagram or Facebook? Probably not. It’s too much of a time suck with not enough benefit to my life at this time. I do miss FB Marketplace, but on the rare occasion I want to use it, I can ask Nick to log in.

Will I continue to use Substack? I’ve really enjoyed writing here, but I may change the format of my writing in the coming year to allow for flexibility in the timing and themes of my posts. We’ve got a lot of deployment left and then an exciting summer of reconnection ahead next year, so I may want to leave more space for that and less for writing. We’ll see!

Thanks for coming along for the ride. I’d love to hear if any of you have tried a similar experiment or you’re thinking about it. I’d love to cheer you on.