For several months (and even a few years) I’ve played around with my social media accounts. I’ve deactivated them, taken them off of my phone, and tried to limit my time on them. I’m one of those highly intuitive people, and something in the back of my mind has always told me we’re going to regret it. Kinda like smoking in the 1950’s and 1960’s. One time I asked my dad if people back then knew smoking would kill them and didn’t care, or if they truly didn’t know. He said both.
With social media, I got to a place where it was too much. I didn’t feel like I needed to know every in and out and concern of every person I’ve known for the past 30 years. I didn’t need to be invited into their homes and vacations, marriages and children’s lives. Sometimes I felt burdened knowing too much. I worried about people. Sometimes anger from something that happened years ago simmered back up in my soul. Then, of course, there’s the common jealousy which leads to resentment, discontentment, and entitlement.
Because I’m sinful at my core, there were times that I’d post pictures with the intent for people to be jealous. Sickening, isn’t it? Yes, but it’s true. I wanted them to see this or that to think that my life is better than it is, more than it is and that I’m am … perfect. Sometimes my posts were just plain lies. I started to think about the people out there who are struggling in whatever way – with money or marriage or infertility or singleness – and how my flaunting my perfect life that is as imperfect as a person can get makes them feel. A picture only tells a blink of a story, not even a whole scene.
Then, inevitably, I’d hurt other people. I wouldn’t comment on their post or like their picture. If I did see them in real life there was this awkward, “What you didn’t know that? I posted it on Facebook?” I felt pressure to stay up on people’s stuff so that I could show empathy and be concerned.
Social media also produced this weird dynamic where because I knew someone 30 years ago, I must know them now. In my mind, because I haven’t seen or talked to them in 30 years, they’re exactly the same person I remember back then – the good, bad, and ugly. Even with knowing that people change, there was this discrepancy between what I see on social media and the person I know in my mind. It was hard for me to reconcile, and quite honestly it wasn’t fair to them.
Same is true for me. I’m not the same person I was as a child or in college, or even in my twenties and early thirties. Even though I gave my life to Jesus a long, long time ago, my thirties were the years God put a fresh lens over my eyes. That has changed everything. I love Him more than ever, and that has to cause some people to think, “Wait, what? Is that the girl I knew who dated that guy? And lost her mind after every break-up? And went to that nightclub in Atlanta? All while serving on every committee at church?” Yep, that’s me. By the grace of God, He wouldn’t let me get away from Him. It bothered me that people saw chapters of my story without the whole book and then formed an incomplete synopsis.
And we don’t even need to talk about the time waster social media is and all the more important things – like reading a book! – that I could be doing. Nor do we need to bring up all the times I shrug off my girls to “just finish writing this post” or “just finish reading this article” or “just finish stalking this person’s page.”
When I read articles like this one about Facebook possibly causing depression, I ask myself, “Why do I keep doing this? Why do I keep doing something I feel like is destroying me and I will look back on and regret? Why do I continue with something that’s getting between me and my girls? Me and my other relationships? Why?”
I began craving my people right here, where I am, the ones I see and touch and talk to with my actual voice. The ones whose numbers are in my phone. The ones I might text a lot, but who I have no qualms about picking up the phone and calling. The ones who might live far away, but who my heart misses and who I wish were closer. Those are my people.
There are good things about social media, but I don’t know if we’re intended to carry such a wide burden for everyone we’ve ever known or even just met in our lives. Not because that wouldn’t be a really cool thing to be able to do, but just because we’re human. We only have so much bandwidth. I think knowing it all, praying for it all, and being involved in it all is more of a God-job, not a people-job. I think that life works better when the circle is closer and tighter. Where we can really get down deep with a handful of people we love, get on our knees with them, cry with them, celebrate with them, and love them well. I think community is better closer, not farther away.
With all my social media tweaking, I don’t know if I’ve found a perfect solution. Right now I deactivated my personal Facebook page. I do not have Facebook or Twitter apps on my phone. With blogging, social media is pretty important. That’s how people know who’ve written something. And if there ever comes a day when God opens the door for something bigger, like writing a book, the bigwigs will want to see how I plan on getting that book out into the hands of people, i.e. social media. That’s just how publishing works. So I maintain a private Facebook profile in which I have no friends, accept no friend requests, and follow no friends so that I can maintain my blog’s Facebook page. I do follow other blogs and companies and news-type stuff on my private profile, though.
Instagram is my favorite. You can see inside celebrities lives, after all! I can, and do sometimes, ahem, get lost for hours on Instagram. I’ve played around with it, too. I have public and private Instagrams account because I wanted to share more pictures of my girls on my private account, but again, for all the reasons I mentioned above, it got too much for me. So now I just use my public account. I don’t follow any real-life friends on there. I only follow blogger “friends”, public people, and celebrities. The Instagram app is on my phone. I’m a work in progress.
This isn’t a perfect solution. I still get sucked in. But I will tell you that I’m much happier without social media. There’s a freedom to it, like the feeling I get when I clean out my house and haul a lot of junk off to donate. I guess I’ve hauled a lot of junk off of my soul. That’s a good thing.
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