Minimalism and Social Media

The last few years I’ve worked to try to simplify my life. Cutting down on extra clutter, extra stuff, and most importantly, extra stress. I used to work a high stress job where I managed several social media accounts, which meant I was attached to my phone and the never ending vortex of online life non stop. My life felt like pure chaos, always trying to keep up, constantly scrolling, commenting, and posting. Never feeling like I could fully disconnect.

Over the years I’ve spent untold amounts of time feeling bad from a nasty comment, or annoyed from a post that just rubbed me the wrong way. Over time I found that I was spending way too much of my real life being annoyed by something on the internet, and worse, starting to dislike friends simply because of something they said online. I didn’t like that.

So I decided to stop.

I went all Marie Kondo on my social media. I stopped following people who’s posts weren’t bringing me joy, especially if they were my real life friends. It’s never worth following someone online if you slowly begin to hate them for it. Save the friendship, ditch the follow. I highly encourage people to do the same with me – if you aren’t into what I’m doing, ditch me online, let’s hang out in real life instead.

The past year I’ve gone through so many phases of trying to figure out what I want from social media. Instagram used to be a favorite, I loved being able to find and connect with people who were interested in some of the same things as me. People who were just excited to create because it made their souls happy. But It’s changed a lot since the early days. I’m not here to rag on it, we all know it’s changed and I think we can all agree, it hasn’t been for the best. It’s not what I want anymore, and part of me is still trying to figure out what that means. Do I ditch it all together? Do I just cut back? I’m still not completely sure what the answer is.

This past summer I took a big break from facebook. I never really been addicted to facebook. In fact I’ve never really liked it all that much, yet I still found myself instinctively opening and scrolling through anyway. So I took it off my phone for a few months, and guess what? I survived. I was actually more than fine, and it helped me to break that natural habit of instinctively opening it. Instead, every time I would open my phone and look for facebook I would instead make myself open my library app and read a few pages of my current e-book. After a few weeks of doing that I realized how much time I had been wasting on literally nothing.

I think in the beginning social media really did start as a great way to connect with people, but its changed leaps and bounds since those days. And maybe we all have a little too. This year I’m striving to spend less and less time scrolling and more time creating. I don’t currently plan to completely cut out social media, but definitely cut back, and free up that time and brain space to focus more on things that actually make me happy.