I have a fraught relationship with social media (I suspect I am not alone in this). About 20% of the time social media is a source of joy, laughter and useful info. About 20% of the time it is a source of frustration, anger and irritation. The rest of the time it is kind of just there, sucking up the rapidly dwindling hours I have left in this incarnation.

My relationship with social media is also like a pendulum. Those percentages (which I obviously just made up) change over time, from being over in the “having fun” side and slowly swinging to the ‘this is toxic as hell’ and then back again. Sometimes when the pendulum is over on the toxic side, I just skip town. Often in a rage-quit kind of way.

Last week I decided to skip town again. My ‘usual hideout’ was feeling decidedly unfriendly again. Rather than rage quit, I stated that I was taking a 2-week break from social media. That felt a little more mature and a little more controlled, and past experience has shown that some time away tends to move the pendulum back towards the good side.

It would have been better if I’d written down when I made the post, but I didn’t, so I’m not sure when two weeks is up. Not for a while though. I’ll put a stake in the ground at August 24th.

The idea was to engineer more peace in my life. In addition to breaking from social media I removed a bunch of blogs from my RSS feed, culling things down to the handful of bloggers who I genuinely feel like I “know” in some way and who I generally get along with. Then I turned my attention to my phone. Removed social media apps (the temptation was too strong otherwise!) and more importantly turning off a bunch of notifications that I really didn’t need.

So how is it going?

Well last weekend was actually pretty nice. I read a lot (as in words printed on actual paper), walked a bunch and generally just enjoyed some R&R from the hub-bub of modern life. That said, while I was reading I did get that antsy feeling and wanted to check my phone. I resisted, since that is also part of the point of this exercise: trying to rebuild my attention span.

This week, work has been frantic [it’s Thursday afternoon and this is the first chance I’ve had to catch my breath] so I don’t know that I would’ve even had time for social media anyway, but I did notice how my brain is trying to get around the guardrails. I’ve been commenting on other peoples’ blogs a lot more than I usually do. I can’t quite decide if this is a good thing or a bad thing. Props to my brain for fooling itself, though.

But going back to the attention span thing… mine is in the toilet these days. I think a lot of people are in the same boat. PartPurple can NOT watch a TV show or a movie without having her iPad in her hands. She has some little paint-by-numbers app that she works on while she watches (listens, really) to whatever is on the TV. When I go out into the world SO many people I see are walking around staring at their phones, oblivious to what is happening around them. We’ve just conditioned ourselves to that constant dopamine drip of ‘something new’ hitting our feeds every few minutes.

This is a really jumbled post. I have so many thoughts that are tangentially related to each other. But since I’m on a break from social media and so have no way to promote it, I guess it doesn’t matter! 🙂

I have been griping about not having a very active imagination these days. Another part of getting off social media is seeing if that helps. If giving my brain idle time where it can just float along and process whatever is going on in there; if giving it that time will help me revitalize my imagination. I already do this to some extent. I’ve been walking a lot and when I do, my phone stays in my pocket. My mind wanders. I really think it helps. I go from “I don’t really feel like doing this” but as the steps go by that feeling fades and suddenly I’m thinking about something from two weeks ago or whatever. Sometimes finding solutions, other times just passively committing things to long-term memory (I hope).

But when I’m indoors I’m either sleeping or DOING SOMETHING and I still haven’t managed to deal with that, or even decided if I need to. But at least, for right now, the something that I’m doing isn’t doom-scrolling.

If all that comes from this is that I spend more time reading, I think that’ll be a win. I saw a YouTube video (YouTube being the one vice that I haven’t touched) where some young Gen-WhateverTheYoungestGenIs was talking about “How to get into reading.” and I thought that was the most ridiculous thing. At least I thought that until I sat down to read last weekend and even my old man brain found it slightly uncomfortable to ‘do nothing but read one thing’ for an hour. A few times I found that I was still reading but not really processing what I was reading. I had to catch myself, back up a page, and restart and kind of focus on focusing.

Gotta tell you, that didn’t feel great. It had me thinking of the days before ‘smart phones’ or even PCs when I’d lose a weekend in a fantastic book, or I’d be recreating some historical battle in a paper map & cardboard chit boardgame, or I’d be building a diorama of some World War 2 scene, incorporating the plastic tank model I’d just painted and weathered. Now all I do is stare at screens all day, every day. I’d like to change that, but I’m not ready to give up on gaming, and work obviously requires staring at a screen.

So my small goal is to spend more time reading print books and magazines, and then maybe, just maybe, finding an interest or hobby that doesn’t involve electronics. We’ll see how that goes. Past experience suggests it won’t go well, but I gotta at least try. You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take, or however that saying goes!

[Header Image Note: That’s a shot I took on my phone (the one I just said stays in my pocket) during a walk. The park I tend to walk in has a nice playground and this sprinkler area designed for kids to play in and boy do they ever have a blast in there. It really has nothing to do with the post.]

[Here’s where my mind is at: I published this post after proof-reading it several times and never noticed I hadn’t given it a title so who knows how it’ll show up out in the wild!]