How 30 days without social media changed my life
stevecorona.com
stevecorona.com
Whether you realize it or not, FB changes your emotional health. FB used to make me oddly depressed. Its like sitting in front of the TV and feasting on Sour Patch Kids for two hours. I would sit there staring at how awesome people's lives were and wonder why I wasn't doing such awesome things myself. I heard about the passing of family members from family friends before family members would have a chance to tell me personally.
After I stopped going to FB my important friends started CALLING me. Can you believe that? They picked up the phone and CALLED me. I went out to dinner more. I stopped engaging in those destructive conversations like "Can you believe so-and-so's status message..."
There have been some drawbacks though. I don't always hear about last-minute parties. I don't get to see the pictures my friends take from events. And I don't have the luxury of sending a message to someone I don't quite know very well who wouldn't have my phone number or e-mail, most likely through group activities like Crossfit that I'm a member of.
But all things considered, ditching Facebook is highly recommended.
FB (and social media in general) is the only thing I've found that enables me to organize going out for drinks with more than 2 people at once.
Also the only thing that lets me post "Hey, anyone wanna go out for ice cream tomorrow evening?" and actually having 5 people come. Three of which are completely new outside twitter/facebook.
It's really quite awesome.
Hell, I have very scatterbrained friends who are always busy with something. Without twitter, facebook and irc I'd never get to talk to them at all. Let alone be able to see them almost every other day like I do now.
And that's not even accounting for the fact that some of us tend to leave the country for months at a time, but still wanting to keep in touch.
Seriously though, how do you usefully and efficiently keep in touch with more than 1 person via telephone? I can't even imagine it working.
Oh and, word of advice from a "silly 24 year old". If looking at other people's lives makes you depressed, lead an awesomer life. Friends being better than you should be an encouragement to do better, not a depressor.
Never happened.
On the contrary, people I met would "friend" me, but still keep me out of their real-world cliques. Example: A guy invited everyone to a party at his house. Everyone else who responded knew where he lived. I sent a message asking. He ignored me.
I had an experience like the GP's. Facebook was an opiate, making me think I was keeping up with friends, when it was really pointless chatter. After I quit, I emailed an overseas friend and we had a far more meaningful exchange than anything during the year we were connected on Facebook.
I guess it depends who you know. Most of my close, in-town friends use FB minimally or not at all. So they weren't the same people I was talking to on FB.
Just because you added someone on facebook doesn't mean that you are now good friends. It means they know you somehow. You'll get invited to people's parties when you're close to them. Facebook supports existing friendships. It doesn't create new ones (well, in general).
In fact, if someone you know but don't certainly like adds you on facebook, it's socially awkward to not accept their friend request, because it is an outward social refusal to not do so. Essentially, you can "force" your way into friending someone. This weird social dynamic allows people's friend lists to grow way beyond proportion even if the feeling isn't mutual for everyone.
Hell, my current girlfriend-like person was initially just an acquaintance on Facebook.
You need to put in an effort. Consistently including online people in your offline life, will eventually turn them into close friends. You talk to them online first, meaningfully, you invite them to offline friendly gatherings and eventually they just become one of your group of friends.
I mean ... it's the same as offline stuff. All your friends were acquaintances at first.
I find PG's "Relentlessly Resourceful" essay equally-useful in a social context. It took me a long time to realize that (for me) social interactions were an active and often taxing process. (And emails / FB messages are pretty much the most passive form of communication anymore.)
One thing about facebook most people don't notice is it is highly customizable
Want everything by email? Doable. Want to not use the site and have most of the important things go by email (where "important things" is set by you)? Doable
And exactly, if you don't know how to socialize, fb won't help you with that! (in the same way MS Excel can't really help you if you don't know math)
And of course, as in the real world, there's vanity, being ignored by people, etc
But I think fb (and twitter) often provide a very good service. Just for a start, fb chat 'killed' MSN messenger
In response to that I'd say think about what social life was like before the very recent invention of online social networks. There is no end to the amount of complex tasks that were arranged long before anything like social media existed, and long before anything as enabling as the telephone existed. The fact that someone would find it difficult to imagine a scenario without facebook, twitter etc. shows how disconnected from the abundant alternatives we have become.
Plus I was always a geek so that goes double for me. So, essentially, I never really learned how to use the phone effectively.
Maybe if your "friends" only get together or even talk to you in response to tweets or facebook, and forget all about you otherwise, you need to consider their real commitment to the friendship.
You know that friends did manage to organize cocktail parties at each other's houses, gather at restaurants, etc. before twitter or facebook existed.
They use twitter/facebook/irc to ask me out for stuff as well ...
Efficiency is the least of my worries when it comes to keeping in touch with friends. Why do we have to be in a rush? Why not slow down and actually take the time to sincerely talk to each one of them? If that means I can't be friends with 100 people, then so be it.
Better to have fewer relationships I take the time to nurture, than 100 shallow ones.
I use FB once a day.
I treat it like a newspaper. A once-a-day update on friends lives that I poke at over a coffee, then throw away until the next day.
I find this a nice balance between having a "real" life, and maintaining some connections with folk that I otherwise wouldn't see socially very often.
Works for me. YMMV.
Once a day (e.g. 15 minutes) use probably gives a person 80% of the utility or value of 20x a day (e.g. 2 hours) usage. There is relatively little benefit from all those "extra visits", since almost nothing on Facebook is urgent, actionable, or going to cost money if not attended to immediately. (A great example of the 80-20 rule in action, btw.)
Then, ask yourself if $amount of money per month is still worth it for a 3G contract. This one really depends on your work and your environment (is there WiFi in walking range if you need it?). But it saved me time and money so far.
In the past 5 years, I've lived in 5 different cities across 3 different countries. My network of friends is very widespread geographically, and I love Facebook for being able to see pictures of my friends or read their random thoughts and what they're up to in life without hassles of long distance calls, scheduling skype sessions, time difference, etc. We often have lengthy conversations through comment threads or Facebook chat. In a way, I use Facebook a bit like a private message board with my close friends and family (this isn't hard for me as I was a big user of message boards as a teenager, so this habit of sharing life with people in a digitally written form is ingrained into me).
But I also go out to dinner with the friends in my current city, hang out and go out with them, text/call them to hear about how that job interview went, etc.
You can use Facebook in an "socially healthy" way, and not spend hours reading it passively.
(I also use Facebook in a semi-unusual way: I have 2 different accounts; one that has less than 50 friends and is not viewable publicly, where I post pictures, ask friends for advice, etc.; and one account with several hundreds of friends that I use as a "public" account. I also have a third account, that I don't really use, as I work a lot with kids and teenagers, and they tend to want to add me— this account is solely for that purpose).
I felt this way with Facebook, but then worked out what was going on. It's a multiple-endpoints situation. The status updates you read aren't coming from a random distribution of your friends. They come from a self-selected population that is doing something interesting at that particular time. People (mostly) don't post status updates about an average workday or lazy weekend.
If you have 52 friends, who each go on vacation one week out of the year, then every week Facebook will be showing you somebody's awesome vacation updates. That doesn't mean that your own life is worse or less interesting for not being on vacation that particular week.
I learned that I never made enough of an impression for any of my friends to inquire where I was.
It was incredibly depressing because I exposed a lie to myself, that I had close friends.
I guess it's been neat, knowing the truth, but it was an expensive trade to obtain it. I've been back on there for a few months again, and sadly, even knowing none of those people actually think about me in their daily lives, it's once again a fantastic placebo.
So if you're sensitive and there's a chance your friends aren't really as close as you think, you should pause before you test every single one of them at the same time.
Well, did you ever inquire where they were?
Intimate conversation, by definition, must be (or at least feel) private. So if you communicate with someone face to face, by phone, or by email, you may maintain the feeling of privacy necessary for real conversation. I'd allow that "private" Facebook messages might serve the same purpose.
Wall posts, however, could not. Everything is said with half a mind to how everyone else will read it.
That's only part conversation; the other part is performance.
It's amazing how much productivity has been disrupted by social media. There are of course huge upsides as well, but sometimes I wonder if the full downside is recognized. A lot of people I know do very little work in the workplace, as they spend all day on Twitter and Facebook. They get around IT bans by using their smartphones... sometimes I wonder if the only thing running corporations these days is automated software.
Another 80s early 90s information device was the magazine, there were tons of magazines which were mostly killed off by the Internet.
Social media is a whole lot of everything and 1% substance on a good day. It's a habit it's like Entertainment Tonight you sit there and one day think "why am I watching this?". That actually happened to me in the late 80s I realized I had a half smile grin Joker sort of thing watching banal celebrity news. These days instead of a dumb smile it's my left elbow with osteoarthritis from leaning on it reading about cats, rage faces and other memes or arguing with strangers over things 5000km away.
One thing I found out about myself is that internet made me lazy. These days I find it easier to read short articles - online articles used to get bookmarked and never read. I'm also trying harder to work on stuff without the net. I'm in electronics/embedded and I used to click around for every little thing. Now I sit down with pencil & paper again until I crack it by hand.
I think it's particularly ironic that he singled out Reddit for providing "absolutely 0 value to me", since Reddit's original use was a news aggregator devoted to separating signal from noise. Nowadays, its a place for people to spout memes.
You have to groom your subreddit subscriptions.
My picks: askscience, 1000words, linguistics, science, somethingimade, DepthHub, books. All these largely contain interesting and productive discussions.
(that and an unhealthy obsession with comparing reddit to digg, though I'm guessing that theme has fallen by the wayside)
However, I noticed that Twitter and Hacker News tend to replace Facebook in that way, so I may follow your lead and ditch those too. But I sometimes find myself in a bar, searching through the internet, trying to find something to read rather than make conversation with a stranger. So i'm going to go one step further and ditch my smartphone. (Protip: Google supports syncing contacts/calendars using SyncML and S60 devices)
I'm not sure how well I will do without Google Maps and GPS to be my Hitchiker's Guidebook, but something tells me that not knowing where your going will lead to a more interesting destination. Or, since I live in Baltimore, getting shot. Either way it's an adventure.
I use Miller's page with teenagers (I'm a teacher); and the article here will be added to my collection. The pitch is 'control and focus your attention'.
> Another trait, it took me a while to notice. I noticed the following facts about people who work with the door open or the door closed. I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on; all the hard work you do is sort of tangential in importance. He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, ``The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.'' I don't know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing - not much, but enough that they miss fame.
Defining yourself by not using something is no better than defining yourself by using it. Just let go and accept that it's a useful tool, nothing more, nothing less.
Anything you would add to the blacklist that you didn't initially?
* delete your twitter/facebook clients from your phone
* delete RSS reader (I still checked Google Reader, but browsed selectively every 4-5 days)
https://monotask.com (downloadable now)
We also have a pro version that lets you customize your whitelist and blacklist.
We hope you use the time to make some awesome stuff!
Since I came to know about Hacker News, my life has changed. Not only I stay away from social media such as facebook, twitter, but also I am away from news websites such as cnn and bbc.And, let me say, it is very good for mind and body to not consume so much news.
- been here since late 2006
This post has inspired me to take some steps to make sure I don't completely revert to the state I was ~1.5 years ago. I too plan to be more consciousness of my Twitter/Facebook/Reddit usage and not just spend large chunks of time mindlessly browsing them, when I could be doing some productive.
Great post, thanks for the reminder!
But social media can be a larger thing. Email lists, discussion forums like this, blogs, etc. Some of those are central to my ability to stay informed and some are central to my actual productive work. I don't know you can separate email lists from something like Hackers News.
So I am separating things into three piles.
1) Discard: Facebook 2) Check 1-2 times/day (HN, a few blogs) 3) Check occasionally (LinkedIn, etc)
I haven't gotten on the Twitter bandwagon, so I don't have any experience with that.
I was inspired by a Reddit comment I stuck in my Evernote a long time ago, but unearthed somewhat randomly: http://www.reddit.com/r/Fitness/comments/pbjk1/what_are_the_...
I guess I'm a bit on the high horse since, I can do social media, and still be able to Judo, workout (6 days a week with insanity,gym, and hiking), dance at clubs, hang out with friends, self help stuff, and study for fun.
I don't think social media is the problem but his lack of discipline.
And everybody is jumping on the bandwagon "Whooa he's right! It's all social media fault." Hello, what you do with your time is up to you, it's not social media fault at all. It's your lack of time management skill.
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I am sure there is an equivalent in chrome.
Other than that though, this was a great article and I'd be interested to start a similar experiment. I do think you if you are more purposeful with social media, you can still be as productive and do cool things like the writer did.
Yes, almost as if our brains evolved in an environment where social media didn't exist, such that social media constitute an exploit for a security vulnerability in our motivation systems. Oh wait, they do.
> Incredibly cliche.
So is "don't take drugs". Sometimes something is a cliche because it's both true and worth repeating.
> Moderation. How does it work?
Step one is to be lucky in the genetic lottery. Seriously, there are people who can indefinitely maintain a moderate habit with cookies, whiskey, cigarettes, cocaine, poker, television and Facebook; and there are people who can't, and need to go cold turkey. As it happens I'm one of the former (well I haven't tried it with cocaine, but I can do the others), but that doesn't make me a better person than the people who can't, just luckier.
It's also worth noting some people have found going cold turkey for a while, was enough to break the addiction such that they could then go back cautiously, in moderation.
I'm assuming that anyone who can spend more than ten minutes on Facebook has way more friends than I do, and/or those friends are much more prolific than mine.
I have the same reaction as you do most days. Oh well, sure glad I checked that! (not). Google+ is actually the opposite. There is such a tech focus from the people I follow that there are demo videos, technical papers, etc that I want to read but don't. Certainly not this, I'm happy because other people are, nonsense.