On Friday night Ivan and I were out to dinner. Our Mexican place is casual; we usually always sit at the actual bar rail. At some point I had my phone out and ended up scrolling on Facebook. (During dinner out with my husband… yes, I realize this sounds bad when I write it out, but I guess in real life it felt… “normal”? (Sadly?) In fairness, we tend to linger there, and I think Ivan was talking to one of the servers or cooks while I did it.)
Anyway, so I’m on Facebook, and I end up clicking on some NBC news article “du jour” in my feed, and because I’m a glutton for punishment, I end up scrolling the comments section. Well. I might as well have strolled out into the middle of a battlefield. I won’t bother elaborating too much- you all know exactly what I’m talking about. Horrible comments back and forth, people full out fighting on the internet, statements from both sides with very questionable veracity, etc.
I could feel my blood pressure rising. My stomach tightens up. I can feel my heart rate increasing. I leaned over to Ivan and started complaining, “Ughhhhhh, I just cannot stand looking at this stuff all the time! Just look at these comments. This just STRESSES ME OUT so bad.”
He goes, “Here, let me see for a sec” and reaches for my phone. So I hand it to him to look at the article, but instead, he swipes out of it, goes to my home screen, and deletes the Facebook app. Then he hands me my phone back and says, “There you go! Problem solved.” 🤣🤣
It made me laugh so hard, first because it’s just such an “Iván” way to handle a problem. lol. He can be very direct about things sometimes. See an issue? See an obvious solution? Do it. The end, nothing to think about here. I am much more likely to see an issue, know deep down that I could in fact do something about it, but then for some stupid reason, keep doing the same thing over and over until I go crazy. 🤪
That was Friday night, and I have not reinstalled it! Similar to my last social media break, it’s always amazing how much “quieter” my life feels without all that noise. Haha.
(I will admit that a little part of me is itching to just log back in and post a final batch of pics from our London trip, because I never posted our final couple days and this feels INCOMPLETE in my head and it’s annoying me. Ha. But overall, it’s interesting how I literally DO NOT MISS IT.)
Now, I really do like to use Facebook to stay up on certain things. For example, fun updates from swim team recaps, school posts or other local community activities/events. I think this is regional because literally almost everyone I know (and all teams/schools/etc) are on Facebook. This doesn’t seem to be the case for my friends in other places, necessarily. I also do find it fun (and often legitimately useful) to see where people I know have traveled and things like that. I have gotten real tips and ideas!
But I have something like 435 Facebook friends. Which is laughable, because I haven’t gone out with an actual in-real-life friend in months, but yet I apparently have over 400 “friends”. Hahaha. And I’m certainly not needing to stay “up to date” with my closest 435 friends, many (most?) of whom I probably wouldn’t even want to sit down and have a drink with in real life. For some of them, I bet we wouldn’t even actually say hi to each other in real life! Would we even recognize each other???
I’m not sure what the long term answer is. (I feel like I’ve written this same exact post in the past, so, sorry if that’s true. I guess this is a recurring issue.)
Maybe a mass clean out of my friends list? Unfollow anything that will feed me comment-ridden news articles? Only check in once a week on a much more curated feed, or just go directly to the specific stuff I want to see??
I also just reallllllllly do like the relative QUIET when I’m not opening Facebook compulsively 40 times a day. (Because I really do. I open it compulsively! Without even thinking about it. I don’t spend long at any one moment, but I pop in and out of it all.day.long and it makes me feel…. gross. And according to my screen time, my Facebook minutes often average between 35 minutes to an HOUR or more a day.)
There’s something about that constant in-and-out I think that specifically bothers me. (Well, that, and just all the crap that makes me feel stressed/bad/negative/etc.)
As we all know, even the good stuff can end up having negative impacts! Then the comparison trap can start up, or FOMO (fear of missing out), or just flat out wasted time.
(Example: I recently saw some travel reels on social media from a well-known/pretty famous blogger from her family trip abroad. The reels were ADORABLE– set to music, her precious children skipping down cobblestone streets, perfectly curated shots of people splashing water from a fountain and eating chocolate and pastries….They were seriously so cute and so well done!!! I feel truly happy for her. And, at the same time, these reels also made me feel weirdly envious. Or some weird emotion that I did not like. Which made zero sense, because I had literally just returned home from my own amazing trip!!! (And yes, I also posted about my own travel recaps and my own sometimes-smiling children!) But there was something about that particular format on social media that just rubbed me wrong, I guess. Reading other people’s travel blog posts never makes me feel like that, or even just looking at their regular pictures online. I don’t know- I can’t quite explain this. But there was something about the very curated reel + video format that I just did not really like. (Maybe because there were 4 young kids along and every single reel looked like pure BLISS and there was some sort of cognitive dissonance happening for me, bc no way could every moment be blissful in Europe with 4 small children?!) Whatever it was, it made me have feelings of, “Wow, they did that all so much better than you did!” (Wasn’t even the same place, but you know what I mean.) It’s a ridiculous thought, but yet, that’s what social media can do! It’s so… weird.)
ANYWAY! That’s my latest brain dump on this ongoing topic. I will admit that the idea of “going off Facebook forever” also makes me feel funny/anxious. Like I said, everyone and everything I know is basically on Facebook, so it makes me feel like I’d be rather “cut off”, I guess. But a lot of that is probably in my head, and I’m sure that it’s one of those things where if you don’t know you’re missing it, are you even missing it??? (e.g. I have never had Tik Tok or X or Snapchat or any others and I barely ever use Instagram, and yet I have zero thoughts about “missing out” on whatever is on those platforms…maybe I am missing out on something, but I just don’t even know what’s there, so I don’t care….).
Ironically, as I did a big email clean out this weekend, I caught up on James Clear’s newsletter and found this quote in the April 3rd edition:
1 Question For You
If a competent CEO got to run your life for a day, what is the first thing they would eliminate?
Ha! I guess Iván was acting as my CEO for a moment there. 😉 It is a good and thought provoking question!
Daily Gratitude:
I am grateful that Ethan made Varsity for tennis! He’s a sophomore and felt like he could be “on the bubble” maybe… He felt like he was strong in try outs but he’s not a year-round tennis player and honestly hasn’t played much since last season, so he wasn’t sure. But he did! He was quite happy last night. 🙂
GRATEFUL KAE 
LOL this is ABSOLUTELY something my husband would do. He’s been off Facebook for … gosh, almost 10 years?? Truly does not understand why anyone uses it. Back in 2016 I went on a massive spree of blocking literally every news site that appeared on my FB feed, hiding anyone who constantly posted inflammatory things, etc. It has made my FB feed actually mostly pleasant – truly the only things I used it for are groups for travel planning, but I do LOVE those groups, and get a lot out of them.
I have always liked instagram more than any other social media network, but sometimes the amount of ads on there is overwhelming and I hate that. Again, I’m focused there on people I actually know in real life, and I do follow a lot of travel influencers but my first thought when I see a beautiful reel is that it’s 100% fake since I’m a cynic at heart 😛
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Oh, yes, and I forgot to mention the travel groups!! I have totally started using those in recent years and have found them super helpful as well. I like the idea of paring it way back and primarily just using it for those certain things.
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I LOVED that question in James Clears’ newsletter. I gave it a lot of thought, too.
I haven’t had Facebook in 17 or 18 years. When we first started dating my husband was adamant about how much he hated Facebook, hated what it represented and I actually wonder if he would have married me if I had stayed on Facebook. I can’t imagine how I would be if I had stayed on Facebook. I think the anxiety and comparison game would have done me serious damage.
I know what you mean about reels and such. I don’t typically see things like that because I’m NOT on social media (and I am all about pictures; I take maybe 2 videos a trip total!), but even though intellectually we know that these people must have had issues on their trip, somehow we doubt it at the conscious level because of how perfect everything looks.
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Ha, that’s funny about your husband’s visceral reaction to Facebook! I guess it’s a good thing you never got really on board with it! 😉 I think for some people who have been on Facebook now for all these years, it feels almost like an integrated part of our lives by now. Which is sort of sad, but getting rid of it almost feels like, I don’t know, saying we’ll no longer have a microwave or something. Haha. It’s just always there…. Cal Newport said something on his podcast the other day that was a good point. He was saying that the question is not “whether the phone is useful or not”. Yes, there are certainly “useful” things about smartphones, and even Facebook has “useful” things (like I said in my post- there are some legit “positives” that I find in Facebook.) But he said, “It’s not whether these are useless or useful. It’s whether on the whole you spend more time with the stuff you care about, or less. Is it making your life richer or less richer?” I like this point because I can get hung up on the argument, “Well, there IS good stuff there, too!” Yep, there is. But if the scale tips more to the negative side overall, then it doesn’t matter that there is some good stuff, if in my overall life, it’s a net negative.
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Well you know how I feel about social media. I’ve been off since December of 2021 and haven’t looked back nor do I really miss it. Phil has FB so he is on the FB group for our block. He is such a moderator so he can have access to those aps but just occasionally look at the content. So if the boys’ activities have FB groups, he’ll be the person in the group. He tends to handle their activities anyways since I travel so much so it makes sense for him to be the point person for communications as well. Granted that may change if I retire early but that is a long ways off.
I really struggled w/ the comparison trap of social media. You can really curate what appears to be a perfect life on IG and FB and that annoyed me because there is zero chance that things are that wonderful in others’ lives. But reels about an idealized trip to Europe with little kids would just make me roll my eyes because COME ON. I know logically that I personally have no desire to travel to Europe with my small children. Good for you, not for me. But it’s one thing to say that and then another to look at content that romanticizes the experience. I also struggle w/ social media in the political environment. I would have to unfollow family members because of the bananas sh*t the person was posting. And it got to a point where I got annoyed by content that I agreed with because who is going to change their mind about politics from reading something on social media!
Congrats to Ethan for making varsity! Our boys have done free tennis clinics at a Tennis bubble in Minneapolis. Paul does pretty well so I am hoping it continues to hold his interest. It seems like it would be a great life-long sport, like golf (neither of which I can do).
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Yes to everything you said! I agree all the political stuff on Facebook is actually laughable, because you’re right- I highly doubt anyone is changing their mind based on a social media friend’s post anyway, so all the people constantly posting opinions and links and comments might as well just be typing into a great void. lol. All it ends up being is a big echo chamber (when people agree) or a boxing ring (when they don’t), but nothing positive comes from it!
And yes on the comparison trap too. It’s a weird phenomenon. It’s like it can make you feel like you want certain things even if you really don’t! I remember once looking at an old nursing school friend’s posts about her 4 children and beautiful new home, it somehow made me feel like, gosh, maybe we should have had more kids or built a big house like that. Except I don’t actually WANT more kids or a great big house to maintain!! 🤣
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I also have/had a terrible habit of clicking through multiple apps for a very short check in (I would do email/insta/FB), very quickly, but I noticed that it was an unconscious reflex that I did so many times a day. I downloaded an app called One Sec, it takes a few minutes to set up, but it forces you to take a deep breath before continuing into the app and also tells you how many times you’ve attempted to open the app in 24 hours. I think it could be a good app for you, your FB time is low, it could help you break the habit of the quick check ins. It definitely hasn’t cured me of my social media habit but it has had an impact on me doing the quick check ins.
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Oh yes, I have heard of this! I can see how that would be useful. I do feel like that’s one of my biggest annoyances with Facebook, just realizing I’m constantly opening and closing it!!
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My kids’ sports/school activities have switched away from Facebook to other online sites and texting to provide updates. I think enough people were displeased having to sign up their kids for Facebook, so they found other methods of connecting.
I’ve given up blogs before (in the earlier days of blogging) because the carefully curated posts and lifestyles started to make me feel unsettled (envious? sad? something amorphous but mildly unpleasant). So I decided that I needed to take a break – I didn’t need to feel worse about my life. (Not the bloggers’ faults – it was me.) And that’s why I avoid instagram too – I need to be present and enjoy my life and not start wanting to be like other people.
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I don’t think any of my kids’ schools or activities require Facebook- all of the main updates usually come via email. However, they do still use Facebook for “fun updates”. So, for example, the swim meet recaps where the coach will outline the “swimmer of the meet” and who got a new state cut or things like that will go out on Facebook. (Do I “need” to see this? Not really! But it’s fun/ nice.) Same with school- the major updates come in a newsletter. But they’ll post pics from the school spirit day or the state basketball team or things like that. All of that makes me feel more “in the know” with the school/activity, I guess…. Maybe though like others have suggested, just checking in only on my computer at certain times and making a point to make the rounds and check the sites I care about.
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I haven’t been on Facebook since 2016 and haven’t looked back. I do have my husband to fill me in if there are any groups related to the kids that are only on there. Try only using Facebook on a computer for a while and see how that is for you. It would probably eliminate the little checks.
Congratulations to Ethan on making the tennis team. Your kids are very athletic.
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I have heard the advice of only checking on a computer at certain times and I do like that idea overall. I know Cal Newport recommends that people “schedule” it for a dedicated amount of time, much like you’d plan to sit down and read the newspaper for 30 minutes on a Sunday morning. And then when that time is over, you are done and get up and move on with your life. I like it! I’ll admit I’ve never actually tried it that way, though. Maybe I will for a while and just see!
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I hear you! My policy is that social media needs to be enriching/enjoyable and if it’s not then I need to take a break or block the folks who are making it not enjoyable.
I love FB for groups – lately my hiking groups, and I also follow a few local travel boards and get great information there. What I don’t love is how many things that I don’t follow show up in my feed, and I’m pretty aggressive about blocking those. I also block things that make me sad – for example I love the page for the shelter where we got Doggo, but when FB decides that I like seeing posts about homeless animals and floods my feed with posts from other shelters, I have no qualms about blocking those. Sometimes people go off on a tear and post things that they really ought not to, and when someone gets too “triggery” they get the mute or the unfriend, depending on the situation.
My other social sanity tool is that I don’t use the apps for FB or LinkedIn – I just go to the websites on my phone. I’m not sure why that’s “better” but I feel like it is. I also don’t allow socials to send me notifications so that I don’t have a constant stream having my chain yanked.
I love seeing photos, and I like watching “real people” reels and Youtube videos, but there is a line where it just feels like someone is living their life to make content, and when I see that I have a “nope” reaction. So I probably would have felt the same way that you felt about the blogger.
Both my husband and I did not look at our phones on our first few dates, and to our credit we mostly are not on our phones during couples time now – but hey no one is perfect and we both definitely peak at our phones while waiting at restaurants and things like that.
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The FB groups can be soooo helpful! I really have gotten some amazing travel info from the groups that would have definitely been harder to get in other ways! Not impossible, but they definitely are a nice tool.
I feel like just going in via the browser on my phone would not be enough of a barrier for me, lol. I also don’t get notifications, but I still seem to just go in WAY too much! The pathetic thing is that when I don’t have FB installed on my phone, I end up checking my email too often, or just sort of “looking for” other things to check!! Like what the heck!! 😆
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I think I would delete FB in a heartbeat, if it wasn’t for my Peloton Group that I am very active in. I try to just specifically go to the group when I open the app and it works sometimes, but I often do get pulled into scrolling the feed and end up wasting time (and precious energy). It definitely needs to be a conscious effort for me to consume FB responsibly.
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Ugh, I know! I think the best idea I’ve seen here is to just use it on my computer at dedicated times. But I know with groups and such, some of the benefit is to just sort of see updates/ ideas as they come through. I’m not sure if it would be the same to only look at them now and then? I guess maybe it would at least be a compromise.
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I think i would have a similar feeling about curated reels. I don’t think I could handle facebook or instagram because I would probably feel like a failure mom as compared with all the cool moms with more and younger children than mine. Somehow I think it would be harder for me to see a curated reel of that than a blog. Also, a super nice professional mom travel blog of people’s trips with kids feels quite unrealistic to me so I wouldn’t really read it, but I do really love reading your (and Elisabeth’s!) travel adventures. It is interesting how different mediums can be so… different!
I’ll probably post about this on my blog soon but I’ve realized my current phone use bugbear is how often I check my phone – that I don’t have longer times in between looking at it. And I think this happens to me in work too, I’ll just want a distraction so I’ll check email and like 4 sites (news or semi-professional things) and then I feel way worse and more distracted but it’s almost become a “click click click” habit! So even without facebok – it’s hard!
I always enjoy reading your thoughts on this topic.
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I know what you mean about the professional travel bloggers. There’s something about knowing that they aren’t also holding down a fulltime job that makes me feel like, Ok, well, this wouldn’t work for me. I also am constantly trying to figure out how exactly they’re PAYING for everything when sometimes maybe the blog isn’t that huge yet, or I start trying to figure out the logistics of like, don’t your kids have to go to school? Where is all your stuff while you’re traveling for 7 months? Do you still also have a mortgage….? Did your husband just quit his job, too, then? Etc. lol! It sends me down a weird mental rabbit hole!
I always love your posts on this topic, too!
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I’m on FB mostly because I’m in touch with so many people (although I have like 650 friends which, what) and I want to keep in touch with those people, but I freely admit I “snooze” anyone who posts anything I don’t like. So my feed is very curated with photos, etc., and that makes me happy. Also I have my own photos on there, in albums, which I like.
But I have a solution for you! Keep the app off your phone, and just check FB when you are on your laptop/ desktop. That way you can check briefly once or twice a day but you won’t pop in and out!
Social media doesn’t make me feel badly but it would make me feel left out NOT to have it. That said, I make sure my feed is very curated so I’m just seeing friends’ photos and updates, nothing political, nothing upsetting. Just dogs and kids and recipes and travel.
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Haha, that is a good point! I really never snooze or remove people, which I suppose would be a good idea. Ha. (Especially considering I also have hundreds of friends – SO many of whom are not even “real” friends! I have tons of people I knew in high school and things like that but have ZERO current connection with. And most I wasn’t even close to in high school!)
I like the idea of using it only a laptop/desktop! I have heard this suggestion before over the years but I’ll admit I never tried it. Most of the day I’m at my work computer, and I wouldn’t access it on my work computer, so this could be an easy way to naturally avoid it. (Versus currently, any time I take a little break or get up to bathroom or for water, I end up checking Facebook…).
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I read this blog post last week on my phone but couldn’t get on to comment so I’m coming back to do so now 🙂 And I think that actually proves my first thought:
I 100% prefer blogs to social media. I like long form and hearing real thoughts instead of snippets. Back when blogging started (15 years ish ago?! Wow) I loved how social it was with people leaving comments and engaging with each other. Now all of that has gone to social media and I get it. Most of us are reading from our phones and it’s hard to leave a long or thoughtful comment on a post that way, so we just don’t. (You get great engagement here though!)
Instagram is so much easier for quick connection and I love that about it, but everything is so instant and then it just disappears. And I completely agree with you that it leaves me feeling “icky” in a way that blogs don’t.
No real conclusion here; just that I’m hoping for a revival of long form, conversational blogs. I think it would help the cause if they brought back google reader or another easier blog reading platform (and not Substack because I don’t have the time to go figure that out- lol!).
Anyway, I enjoy your blog and space so much, even though I don’t always comment because I read from my phone, making me part of the problem- ha 😉
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