At the end of a week without social media, Collin Slattery is becoming aware of the changes in himself.
The first week without social media is over. It has been, for better and worse, a very interesting week. I started this experiment expecting massive, rapid change in pretty much every facet of my life. This is not what has happened. I assumed that by the end of my first week, I would go from being someone with fairly severe social anxiety to a social butterfly; I have not.
The most glaring thing I noticed is that of all the people who I am friends with on Facebook, only three have contacted me outside of Facebook to ask about deactivating my account. What does it say about my relationships that after a week without an account on Facebook, only three people noticed or thought to maybe get in touch with me? Has our digital socializing made even the effort of picking up the phone or sending a text message too much, or does it make us so self-centered we don’t even realize when someone disappears? Perhaps I just make a poor choice of friends.
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Worrying about what people would think, if they’d find my comment funny, and whether they would find me weird did not even cross my mind this afternoon getting lunch. I did not even realize the magnitude of this change until writing about it now.
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My social anxiety is definitely less oppressive than it was last week. I am not the life of the party, but I have noticed changes. I am more likely to have conversations with random people. I have not been initiating conversations with, say, cute girls on the street in an effort to get a phone number, but I will participate in a bit of banter with cashiers when getting food. Worrying about what people would think, if they’d find my comment funny, and whether they would find me weird did not even cross my mind this afternoon getting lunch. I did not even realize the magnitude of this change until writing about it now.
With that said, I definitely feel more isolated. Surprisingly though, I feel less lonely. Sitting at home and reading stuff on Facebook used to make me quite depressed. I feel a comfort in my solitude that I did not have before. I am choosing to be alone as opposed to being ostracized. I do not get into negative feedback loops that quickly ruin my day. I still get episodes, but they are shorter and shallower than before.
The best and most noticeable change so far is the fact that I am far less stressed than I used to be. I cannot remember a time in my life where I am less stressed than I am today. I no longer have to rush and try to create this image of myself that I am comfortable sharing with others; I can do what I want, when I want, at the pace I want without considering the opinions of other people.
I am truly interested to see how week two will shape up. Change takes time, but I hope it definitely continues. I also need to decide how much I want to push myself and for what reasons. I initially wanted to really push myself just so that I could write about all these massive changes that were taking place. Now, I am not sure if trying to force changes for the sake of more interesting content is really the way to go. This is, after all, the changes that taking a hiatus from social media creates, not what I can prove to strangers on the internet.
Read more on Collin’s experiment:
30 Days Without Social Media: Two Weeks In (coming soon)
—Photo credit: whologwhy/Flickr
About Collin Slattery
good luck during week two.
er, this is a bit odd. no facebook, but still psoted to twitter. and in all honesty blogging is social media too. what he should do is just keep a writte diary and then publish a story at the end of 30 days. to keep posting along the way is to still require that people are interested i what you do / write, ad isnt that the whole point, to get away from defining your life based on the actions of others.
He submitted the story and gmp did the rest. Collin isn’t making the social media around the piece, publishers are.
This was before social media was a thing, but I tried living without tv for a while. New city, no friends there yet. I guess at the time, tv was an analogous sort of time suck. Living without it definitely got me out of the house more, more into finding things to do and meeting people. So, good luck with your experiment. I hope you also find some success with it.
NYC is the place to do stuff and get out of your isolation…I hope you are enjoying fireworks with friends (and maybe some new ones), checking out the CBGB Festival, or doing some activity as part of a singles club….Check in with your friends from Stuy (I bet quite a few of them still hang out in the city) or take a class in something you always wanted to learn about….
Thank you, Collin, for trying something that these days many people would be afraid to try. And I do hope it goes well for you. I’m from a different generation, which never got so attached to social media, and I can tell you that it bothers me to see so many people with eyes at a 45-degree angle, looking down at their iPhones, rather than looking straight ahead, or to one side or the other, interacting directly with the visible world and the human beings who are a part of it.
I was particularly interested to see where you wrote, “The best and most noticeable change so far is the fact that I am far less stressed than I used to be. I cannot remember a time in my life where I am less stressed than I am today. I no longer have to rush and try to create this image of myself that I am comfortable sharing with others; I can do what I want, when I want, at the pace I want without considering the opinions of other people.”
I don’t know if you are familiar with the work of Sherry Turkle, a psychologist, and professor the social studies of science and technology at MIT, but she is deeply concerned about the effects of social media, especially on young people. What you said could have practically come directly from her 2011 book, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. Turkle writes, “It is poignant that people’s thoughts turn to technology when they imagine ways to deal with stresses that they see as having been brought on by technology. They talk of filters and intelligent agents that will handle the messages they don’t want to see.”
But clearly Turkle feels, and I agree, that this simply escalates the problem. We are a nation addicted to checking our messages, texting, and tweeting. With chapters titled “Always On,” “Growing Up Tethered” and “Anxiety,” she seems to have captured our modern-day world and its double-edged sword of constant contact.
Maybe others will be tempted to try your experiment, and experience the reduction in stress that you have enjoyed.