I Went Social Media Light
Or, at least I tried to
It was a noble goal.
We were on vacation for our 20th wedding anniversary. We were going to Hawaii for the first time ever. We planned for it to be the vacation of a lifetime. After all, it was the most expensive trip that we had ever planned for just the two of us and we wanted to get everything out of it that we could.
I wanted to eliminate as many distractions as possible, and that meant stepping away from my social media.
I have a love/hate relationship with social media. It has definitely offered some positives in my life. I have maintained relationships with high school and college friends that I would have otherwise completely lost touch with, and many of those relationships have proven important to me over the last couple of years. I am able to easily share our family activities and keep up with those of my family members who live in different states. I’ve developed online relationships with others that have helped me grow professionally and personally. I enjoy following many different accounts and dreaming of things that I could also do someday. And as someone who wants to continue pursuing a writing career even while I am teaching, social media has allowed me to expand my reach and make connections to get my work published in a variety of places.
But like many, I have an unhealthy relationship with my social media accounts. I spend too much time scrolling through different accounts for news bites and hot takes. I’ve worked hard to step away from online debates but still find myself emotionally invested in the debates of others, often having to remind myself to step away before I say something that I’ll regret. As a podcaster and writer, I check my stats and updates far too frequently. And worst of all, I spend time looking at my phone when I should be looking at my family and actually talking to them.
So on this vacation of a lifetime with the love of my life, I decided that I needed to pull back, at least a little.
I deleted my podcasting and writing apps so that I wouldn’t be tempted to check statistics for the week that I could do nothing about anyway. I deleted Facebook from my phone so that I wouldn’t be constantly checking the updates of friends and family. I refused to bring my laptop along and was only able to check those above-mentioned apps on my tablet after a full day of exploring and vacationing.
And then I had to practice self-control.
While I occasionally posted to my Instagram stories, that was the only time I spent on the app during the day. When I posted to Instagram, I was scheduling my posts through the business app and then just leaving the pictures to post while I was asleep (thanks to the six-hour time difference). I left Twitter on my phone, but again, I just focused on posting occasional vacation updates throughout the day and mostly kept my scrolling to early morning breakfast time and the airport while we waited for the plane to board. While it was a newsworthy week, I did my best to stay away from most of the news, only checking in occasionally and avoiding participating in toxic hot takes.
Could I have done more? Yeah, I should have probably taken Twitter off of my phone as well. Did I practice decent self-control? I think so? However, it was far from perfect.
But more than anything I felt connected to my husband and connected to Hawaii. And it showed me that I probably needed to make the same moves when we go on our family vacation this summer.
Social media is a beautiful and terrible thing. It both connects and divides us. But maybe we can all learn to at least make it a secondary character in our family vacations.
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