So I feel like I emerged from a cave yesterday when I came out of a five-day social media fast. How do I feel? Like the rest of the world gets around by sports car, and I got handed a wagon with a broken wheel and no horse.
My rules were simple: communicate with people voice-to-voice or face-to-face for five days. I got rid of Instagram, Facebook, and X and only answered texts and emails with a return voice call, not by keyboard.
I thought it would be a great week – I’d be more spiritual. More time for rich relationships. More time to deeply reflect. Mind you, I try to take time like that every week. But I thought social media fasting would enhance that to the nth degree.
Uh. No. Not at all. It just made everything more complicated. Sign of an addict? I don’t think so, and I hope not.
Read on and make up your mind.
6 Learnings From My Social Media Fast:
- It wasn’t that hard not to tweet or post no my Instagram page. I had the urge, but it wasn’t like the response a caffeine addict might have to no coffee. It could easily last a month or more.
- What I did miss was knowing what was going on in my friends’ lives. Most of the benefits of social media for me are staying in touch and keeping up on what’s happening in other people’s lives and ministries. It felt lonely actually, like a bunch of great people had exited my life.
- It was incredibly inconvenient. I could not get to inbox zero because I couldn’t effectively follow up on everything that came across my inbox or desktop. Not only was it inconvenient for me, but it was also very inconvenient for our staff and other colleagues.
- Phone calls aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. When you’re used to communicating with someone via email, text or DMs, switching it up to voicemail makes it more complicated. Text-based messaging gets sent at the convenience of the sender and read at the convenience of the recipient. The phone is very intrusive compared to that in the 2020s.
- Good communication rule: communicate with people the way they want to be communicated with. I decided I would read email but ask people to respond by phone. I had an auto-responder set up on Gmail explaining my five-day fast and asked people to call me instead. Not many did. I could be wildly unpopular, or it might just be that people pick the channel of communication they want and stick to it. I did call a few people, and we had some fun conversations, but I got more voicemails than actual conversations. Online messaging is FAR more efficient and fun.
- I did have more time to reflect and think last week…not much, but some. But I felt my world got much smaller, and I missed the people who make it larger and richer with their presence.
Conclusions From Fasting Social Media:
- I thought the social fast would be liberating, clarifying, and spiritually uplifting. Instead, it was mostly inconvenient.
- Social media can lead to narcissism for sure, but I found I wasn’t really missing updating my own status, I was missing every else. And missing the chance to engage and interact.
- I thought I would be asking everyone to do a media fast in our Like Me series on social media (coming up in November at Connexus). Maybe a better bottom line is this: some of us (narcissistic folks etc) need to use social media less, but some of us need to use it more. If you’re not texting, on Facebook or online in any meaningful way, you’re missing a huge part of the conversation. You’re being left behind. And people younger than you might not be talking to you at all. This is just actually the way millions of people communicate now. You miss it at your own peril.
That’s what I learned. Have you ever done a social media fast? What was your experience? If you haven’t done one, what do you think you might discover if you did one?
