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Social Media Addiction

Getting Offline to Remind Myself Who the 'F' I Is

By Charlotte FriendPublished 5 years ago 4 min read
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I didn't think I spent hours each day worrying about what others thought about me—or at least the select shots and thoughts I chose to share with them. But when Apple released their screen time and I noticed how much time I spent on these apps, I began to question my own sanity.

At first it was up to four hours per day spent on social media—five if it was a particularly rough one. The people who said, "Oh, I don't even wanna know how much time I spend on those godforsaken apps..." during this stage of my weaning process always confused me. Why not? What would your numbers concern you with? And if they're so concerning, why are you running from them and not utilizing them to make the changes you clearly believe you need to make?

Anyyywaaaay ... I've been using the screen time feature and tracking all of my bullshit since that feature was made available and I'm just now cutting down and sticking to my one hour social media limit.

It's been a slow and reflective process because when you no longer have other people's accomplishments and vacations to distract you, all you can do is think and observe the world around you. Shout out to the "notes" app, for giving me a fake platform to share my musings on life with no one. Just for me.

"Notes" is where I go when I have the desire to be heard and seen but have hit my one hour limit of social media time. "Notes" is the app where thoughts and feelings go to ferment and become solidified into projects for me to carry out rather than a simple, quippy thought in 280 characters or less.

As a multi-disciplinary artist, I always used the excuse of, "oh, well, it's important to be connected because of my line of work," or, "I'm just constantly looking for inspiration." Both of these things are technically true. However, they have a deeper meaning and commitment now that I only get one hour to scour the internet for "inspo" and to check in on friends and fellow artists.

I'm not gonna lie, it took me a few weeks to not only grasp the concept of (at the time) only spending two hours on social media each day, but also to break the bonds in my head linked between my life online and the feelings of validation it often gives. But now that my existence on the internet is filed in a different folder in my brain, I don't even want to be online. I don't give a shit what people think about the life I've built there. And I've done my darnest to build it around the real me.

The real me used IG half for validation and half to log important moments in her life even if they seemed less important to my audience. Now that I have to be in and out of socials in an hour, I don't even know what to post to get the most validation. I'm out of the loop on trends and that, my friend, is freeing. The one hour time limit helps me to keep true to myself and only share what I want to share—not what others are sharing to get likes.

I strategize my time to the point now where I often forget to check how much likes one of my posts got. Because, ultimately the time-suck I got trapped in on the IG was checking for validation. I didn't realize how much time and energy I spent wondering if people liked this minuscule fraction of a fraction of a peep into my soul. And I do try to be as open and myself as possible, but that always changes when you know there's an audience. It just does. Whenever I post, I act like there's no audience, but it's impossible to completely disregard the crucial half of the online space and culture that creates social media.

If this new relationship with social media continues in this trend, my life on-screen will be a perfect capsule of who I was at that moment in time without fear, expectation, or acknowledgement of an audience.

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