Stepping Back from the Clutches of Social Media

Today, I invite you to consider the overwhelming grasp  social media has on your life and to consciously regulate it. 

I’ve encountered the adverse effects of its constant use, especially its addictive, dopamine-fueled, ego-inflated highs of seeing people like and retweet my ideas. Of course, if I’m not careful, this can lead to narcissism, an emptiness so long and deep that I can only get validation externally. 

This is why I believe that taking a break and detoxing from social media is a necessity and I reflect on that in my latest conversation with my friend Thomas Chatterton Williams on his podcast, Wrongthink.

On good days, social media presents us with a way to catch up with friends, laugh at memes, and just be in the know about what’s going on. On bad days, it binds us to a very shallow way of perceiving ourselves and our neighbors as caricatures, and it convinces us that we must wage an all-or-nothing battle to defeat their ideas. (Twitter, I’m looking at you.)  We become so addicted to this that we  can find ourselves waking up each morning with a feverish desire to glue our faces to our screens immediately, desperate for the heroin drip that comes with getting notifications, a false sense of affirmation that we matter. 

But of course we do matter and that fact has nothing to do with how many likes we have on instagram. Really understanding this and cultivating this knowledge requires detoxing from an ecosystem that signals otherwise.  

My practice is to be on social media one day on, two days off, and when I detox I find I have an abundance of time to invest in personal growth practices like meditation, reading, practicing guitar, and being in community with my friends. My inner world expands and flourishes and I discover how much richness and dimensionality others have as well. I realize that every human being is a universe in and unto themselves. This realization gives me more energy to actually be social – something that becomes impossible if your entire sense of self worth is dependent upon being validated by an external digital apparatus.

If you don’t deliberately take time off social media to cultivate this level of awareness, you’ll miss out on an incredible opportunity to forge authentic connections  with yourself and others. This can only really be achieved by learning how to live in the present moment – not in anticipation of whether your actions will gain you some fleeting reward. 

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