117. Beyond the Screen: Rediscovering Life Without Social Media
117. Beyond the Screen: Rediscovering Life Without Social Media
Digital Minimalism
Sammie and I both deleted all our Social Media a few years. We even discussed quitting Social Media on one of our early episodes of this podcast. Sites and apps like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and more are built to be addictive. The goal is to keep your eyeballs on the app so that each company can sell more ads. We found that time spent on those apps never felt satisfying. We wanted to look at some ways to evaluate your social media use and see if you need these apps or sites in your life. For this episode, we found that On Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport was a great complimentary piece.
Start with First Principles
Think about what your goals and values are in general. What are you trying to accomplish? Only then should you think about what digital tools will help solve those problems. For us, we found that we wanted to use social media to promote our podcast and we tried Instagram and Twitter to see if that would help make a different.
Evaluate and reevaluate if using social media is the right tool.
When we were posting clips of our podcast on Instagram, we found not too many people found us via that method and most people subscribed on their podcast player and remembered to listen on their own. Moreover, we were losing time scrolling on Instagram. So Instagram ended up being the wrong tool and we scrapped it. Now we have this website to be the home of our online community!
Digital Clutter is Stressful
The more social media you have in your life, the more clutter your are inviting into your brain.
Be Active, Not Passively Scrolling
The key thing is that we are meant to be active and we find joy in doing. Action changes things. We found that when we are passively scrolling Instagram, Twitter, TikTok or whatever the tool of choice, we were shifting from productive hours to simply mind numbing scrolling hours. This wasn’t satisfying and didn’t help us live fulfilling lives that were in alignment with our values.
Today we shared the podcast, The Self Improvement Project hosted by Lawrence, a podcast veteran. On his catalog of over 200 episodes of The Self Improvement, Lawrence covers a wide range of topics around self growth and mastery. He shares his own journey and struggles with self improvement in these easy to listen episodes.
Show Notes:
News Feed Eradicator Chrome Extension - Blocks your news feed on different social media websites
Shout to Joshua Lelon - check out his comment on the inner voice here!
Check out Michelle’s conversation with Erica on The Me Bet:
If you enjoyed this topic, check out our episode on The Upside of Being Off Social Media which focuses on the benefits that come from deleting your social media and ways to break the addictive cycle.