So. What now?

 I know I've had like 18 what now moments in my last few posts, but given that it's now April 6 and the plan was only ever to go off social media for one month, I have to consider not only what to do about that now, but also what to write about on this blog next. It was nice to have a sort of theme, a challenge- something to very loosely focus my writing around because it kept me coming back. Being off social media was something I thought about all the time.

An obvious suggestion occurs to me in the whole working full time and being in school full time and also having that other extremely casual part time job cleaning my dad's office and scanning charts (I say extremely casual because I've done no scanning, only cleaning). But honestly, that isn't going to be anything that feels new, at least not to me (and I'm aware the social media stuff wasn't new). 

I think the social media thing spoke to a larger trend in my life of wanting to create a life I actually like within the limitations I have. Those limitations being things like- I live under capitalism, so I must work. I'm also an animal- I need things like food, water, sleep, and social interactions, which all require effort on my part. And the limitation that if I want to do anything, it requires effort. This is all to say that quitting social media was in service of the life I wanted to live. I'm making concessions like keeping snapchat because of the social interactions thing. I have some friends who seem to primarily communicate on snapchat, and while I can ask that they text me outside of it, I can't actually force them to do anything. Not being able to force others around me to quit social media too is actually something I've found quite limiting, but I digress. 

At the end of the day, I got out of this experiment what I wanted from it going in. I pushed and challenged myself. I learned some new things about myself and what I want from my life. It was empowering in a way to do something despite the many, many reasons I could find why I shouldn't. To choose something that is harder in some ways because it's better in the long run. It's nice proof that I can do it, I just need to find the right way. Writing here helped, having a time limit helped, and finding other outlets for those brief spaces of time when I don't have anything to do helped. Quitting for the month gave me some agency, helped along by the fact that I was hearing a lot less of other people's opinions. It was also a good reminder that the moves I make towards a life I want can be small. Uninstalling apps is pretty easy. Getting my PhD is not. 

So. What now?

I honestly don't even know. I might have to sit and think on this a while. I've become a person who doesn't feel like she needs to be on instagram, which I didn't expect. 

To be fair, something else that comes to mind is being the kind of person who Does Things. This links back to what my husband said to me probably about a week or two after we first met about what I like to do for fun, and how I realized I just spent all my time online, and it links with social media- it's a Thing You Do Online. But I want to be the kind of person who like, goes to the public library, volunteers too be a judge at the local science fair (AND I WOULD HAVE DONE IT TOO IF I WASN'T OUT OF TOWN), has regular nights out and nights in with friends, reads cool books, takes classes, etc. Someone who's outside in the fresh air doing outside things. Someone who is active. Someone who's involved. You get the gist. Not to sound too corny about it, but I'd like to live life in the real world.

There's also an element of this where I want to focus only on connecting with people I actually know or can interact with in a real world setting. I don't want to focus on interacting with strangers online. At the very least, just one stranger at a time. This is why I stop myself so often from responding to comments, sometimes even from making them. It's why even on anonymous sites where I have an account, I find myself getting drawn into arguments that just make me so irrationally angry, I have to block people just to make it stop for my own sanity (this is when I don't stop myself from making a comment). I'm just sick of it. That kind of stuff doesn't happen in real life nearly as often, because people behave differently when they are face to face- and I say this as someone who has witnessed some truly irrational, childish, threatening behaviour from male students I have taught (and only male students, though fortunately a very small subset of them).

The marketing stuff also no longer speaks to me. The one thing I've missed this whole time is just being able to see content from friends, particularly when we meet up in person and they are confused when I don't know about x or y thing that happened to them because they sent it on some app I'm no longer using. I have not missed any of the interacting with strangers bit, because it turns out that wasn't enriching my life. Reading what strangers write, considering the opinions of others, whatever, that's one thing, but platforms that enable me to easily interact with people I've never met and never will is just something that isn't adding to my life like I thought it was going to. I care about the actual purpose of what these platforms were supposed to fulfill- connecting with friends and family in new and interesting ways- not what they fulfill now- people creating content of their life to show to others, and constantly exposing you to that. This whole thought is kind of half-baked in my head at the moment, but this thread has been consistent through the whole month: I miss my friends. I feel like I get less of them because they're on these platforms. In a metaphor, they are physically in these spaces I'm choosing not to enter because so much of what goes on in there isn't what I want for my life. But there is stuff I do want for my life on there: people I care about. Ugh. I still haven't found a way to resolve this.

I'm trying to end this on something thoughtful and profound but there isn't anything there right now.