Social Media Reboot

I enjoy social media. There, I said it... I must confess that I enjoy perusing my Facebook and Instagram feeds and peering into the lives of friends, family and acquaintances. Some of these connections are relatively new, whereas some feel like they originated in another lifetime (maybe even in a galaxy, far, far away?) This being said, I also recognize the insidious energy-drain that is social media. I find that social media influences how I view the present moment, engages me with malefic cultural forces, and at minimum, has an opportunity-cost that impacts my ability to execute some life goals. With these various thoughts in mind, I'm planning to reboot my relationship with social media.

What would it feel like to reinvent your relationship with social media?

Rebooting my interaction with social media will allow me to re-engage with the present moment. Over the past few months, I found myself looking at life or engaging with activities and thinking about how I would describe the experience on Facebook and/or Instagram. Rather than cherishing the moment and being present, I thought about how I would embalm the moment into a readily digestible image or phrase. And then once I distilled the moment into a shell of itself, I kept an eye on its number of likes and the comments. Upon reflecting on this consumerist approach to life, I felt that change needed to occur.

In addition to the negative influence of social media on engaging with the present, I've long been aware of the questionable influences of social media on our collective wellbeing. Many observers have noted how social media companies generate vast fortunes by leveraging the power of intermittent reinforcement in hijacking human sociability. While the causal pathway toward anxiety remains elusive, many fingers point to the collective downturn in wellbeing as related to the meteoric rise in social media engagement. In particular, the Facebook/Instagram juggernaut of Meta seems pretty unapologetic about their contribution to various social ills, while enjoying staggering profits. While I appreciate the philanthropy of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, I'm increasingly uncomfortable participating in the mega Meta-verse social experiment, and am curious to see what life feels like free from its gravitational pull.

Lastly, I have a looming project to complete - my doctoral dissertation. As my work life builds into its post-PhD guise, the accrued time of scrolling, liking, and commenting directly conflicts with the time required to push, pull, drag or tow the dissertation across the finish line. There are so many interesting things to do in this life - why spend time engaging with curated, 2-dimensional facsimiles of lived life?

As a first-step in this reboot, I removed Facebook and Instagram from my phone and have significantly reduced interacting with the Meta-verse on my desktop. I may post now and then, though I'll focus on more substantive writing via this blog. And if you'd like to stay in touch, please feel free to reach out.