Life after FaceTwitStagram

A little over a month ago, I pulled the plug on all my remaining social media accounts and went full-on cold turkey on everything. And by “cold turkey”, I mean that I didn’t leave myself the option of reactivating those accounts. Twitter and Facebook make it intentionally hard to leave the service altogether, for obvious reasons, and they instead suggest you just let your account sit dormant until you come to your senses. (Facebook also tries to put a guilt trip on you by letting you know how VERY MUCH your friends are going to miss you.)

So the accounts are gone. In the process, I lost a few hundred Facebook friends and about 6,000 Twitter followers. And you know what happened to my professional and personal relationships?

Not a damn thing.

The people who were in touch with me before are still in touch with me. They have my phone number and my private email address. I did not disappear like Marty McFly in the photograph just because I am no longer on social media. I have no doubt that I’ll miss out on a few things—Twitter in particular was useful for the occasional coordination of meet-ups and social events with colleagues—but I think that the negative impact of social media on my ability to focus vastly outweighed the networking benefits.

And I have to tell you that the absence of social media has had a major positive effect in my life. I didn’t even realize just how pervasive that low-level background din of constant information and compulsive cycling through feeds had become until it was no longer there. I’m more relaxed, more productive, and better able to concentrate for long periods of time. And I am unaware of the Outrage of the Day, which means my mood and anxiety levels have improved greatly. It’s to the point where I don’t even check news feeds anymore beyond a quick headline skimming. I’ll tune in to NPR on the way to the grocery store, and that does the trick of keeping me generally informed without subjecting myself to the information barrage of online news sites. Maybe sometimes ignorance really is bliss.

It’s strange how the first few days after social media feel like kicking an addiction. I found myself reaching for my phone more than once to snap pictures for my Instagram feed, and that urge only subsided after a week or two. But now, the idea of stopping my day for a minute to post something for likes or comments has no appeal anymore. There’s a reason why the social media engineers make their products intentionally addictive—they make money every time someone pulls down on their feed to refresh it. (Even the very motion used to refresh is a slot machine kinetic, and that’s exactly what Twitter and Facebook have become. They’re not information or quality social connection, they’re slot machines in our pockets, and the people who put them there are the ones who get the payout.)

I’m not saying that everyone needs to get off social media, but I think that more people should consider it, especially those of us in the creative field. Writing requires long periods of unbroken concentration, and Twitter and Facebook are explicitly designed to claim attention as much as possible. I’m pretty sure that if I had ditched social media two years ago, I’d have two or three more novels in my backlist, and the ones I did manage to write would have turned out better than they did with social media in the picture.