I’ve written several different essays this year about removing social media from my life. Recently, I was catching up with a friend (hi, Michael!) who said “Isn’t funny how much energy we put into not doing things?” And life does seem that way, sometimes. But the project of moving past social media (like any cleansing effort) is more than just “getting rid” of it; we must also consider the new practices that manifest in the space it leaves behind. So instead of dragging social media through the mud some more, I wanted to share that new perspective of creativity & growth.

This list of habits & activities is actually the intersection of two major social paradigm shifts: getting off social networks, and trying to self-actualize during a pandemic. I wonder what will fall off this list once we’re all vaccinated and back to whatever it is we were doing before. And I don’t necessarily know that I would’ve picked these things up if it weren’t for the pandemic, so casting social media as the foil may be a bit imprecise. Either way, here’s what I’ve been up to lately.

Twitter contains many millions of lines of code; iOS’s default Reminders app probably contains less than 5,000. And yet, that Reminders app has become my primary way of keeping in contact with the outside world. Since I no longer have the ambient awareness of my friends’ lives through social media, I have set up a series of recurring reminders on my phone which pop up and nudge me to text, call, or email the people I want to share my life with. I set them up so that I receive a few of these reminders every day. In addition to recurring reminders, I add one-off reminders if a friend suddenly comes to mind, and I set future reminders when friends make me aware of specific upcoming life events. I’ve found that people love it when I text them asking for wedding or baby pictures. Here’s an example of what my to-do list might look like on a given day. I feel like I’m on the phone, on FaceTime, or writing emails all the time now, and it is awesome.

This tool has had several benefits for me. It’s made me a much more reliable friend; you can trust that I’ll call you when I said I was going to! It’s also allowed me to stay in touch with a large group of people, which has made me feel far more connected than when I was just “keeping up” with them by watching their posts online. I don’t find myself saying “we should catch up more often!” anymore; I just set a reminder to call them every month. And importantly, I’m not wasting time and energy processing information about the lives of people I don’t need to know about, which leaves me more time and energy for everything else 🙂.

I actually have the global pandemic to thank for this one. Or, at least, for getting everyone accustomed to jumping onto group video calls. As someone who has almost always worked remotely, casual video calls have long been part of my life. These include scheduled “coffee breaks” and virtual happy hours with coworkers. Heck, I still get together for monthly virtual happy hours with former coworkers, even though most of us have left the company!

I was overjoyed when group zoom catch-ups came into vogue when the pandemic hit. A the time, Liz and I were planning on moving to Albuquerque, NM and I was actively brainstorming ways to stay in touch with friends. And then the perfect one fell into my lap!

Social Zoom Call Fever has died down, but I have persisted in getting my high school and college friend groups together every so often not just to catch up, but to spend a good long Friday night sitting around having a few drinks and laughing, the same way we used to at the bar. I may even like this better than a bar; it’s way cheaper, no one has to drive, and despite living in different cities, we can do it as often as we want 🍻.

Liz and I have also made the decision to expand the list of news sites to which we subscribe beyond just the New York Times. Unexpectedly, but not surprisingly, the quality of the content we are consuming has gone up significantly. Reading longform investigative pieces published in The New Yorker or in The Atlantic is so much better than skimming headlines on Twitter or Facebook. And so much calmer. Not only is the writing itself of a much higher caliber, but thoroughly researched pieces make me feel better informed. Getting news from Twitter and Facebook (combined with inflammatory takes) might’ve made me feel prepared to shout about an issue; but reading directly (and solely) the work of good journalists puts me in the mood for a thoughtful discussion.

Logging onto news websites has also made me realize: the world doesn’t fall apart if I miss one day of news. I’m not taking action on everything I read, and if it’s not going to affect the way I live my life… why do I need to know about it? Instead of feeling like I need to know “what’s going on today,” I now only feel the need to read the news once or twice a week. It’s helped slow me down my intake, and at the same time, to feel better informed.

We subscribe to the NYTimes, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic. I’ve been a print subscriber to Jacobin magazine for a while, but this year I also added a subscription to New Philospher on top of that. The magazines are beautiful; in addition to being full of incisive thinking, each issue is a wonderful design object.

Participation Needed: Besides The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, all of this media is inarguably left-of-center. If you know of smart, reasonable and respectful conservatives (or conservative publications) producing well-written pieces on current events, please send me an email! Andrew Sullivan is currently my only lead in this category, although my conservative theology needs are more than being met by First Things magazine, among others 🙂.

Update 1: Thank you to the reader who suggested Plough Quarterly! Those interested in intentional community, the benedictine option, and post liberalism will likely enjoy it.

Beyond reading more news, I’ve also started readying a hell of a lot more books. Specifically, ebooks - most of which I rent from my library and read on the Libbyapp. Without social media feeds of any kind to look at, my iPad has basically just turned into a big screen to read things on. Instead of picking up a device planning to check Twitter for 5 minutes, I now jump on planning to read 5 minutes of a book. And instead of getting distracted for an hour and a half by Twitter, I now get distracted for an hour and a half by that book.

I’ve also started to let myself be less pretentious about what I read. I’m not sure if it was my humanities-focused high school, my liberal arts friends from college, or the literary virtue-signalling that happens online, but Liz has long pointed out my terrible habit of choosing lofty, dry, terrible books for myself to read. When I really let myself choose what to read, it turns out to be science fiction! I had no idea before this year. I just had a blast reading The Patternist Series by Octavia Butler.

The slowing down and exiting the daily news cycle that I mentioned above has also bled into my choice of audio content; I used to spend my mornings listening to The Daily and The Journal (among others) in order to stay up-to-date. I’ve now totally abandoned listening to morning news brief-style podcasts, and have instead switched over to listening to audiobooks. Audiobooks are another new territory for me, but one that I’m having a lot of fun with.

Now that I’m off social networks, I’ve been taking more correspondence and news the old-fashioned way: email. Liz and I have started using an email service called Hey, which costs us $99 per year, but makes email a total joy to use. Seriously. It’s light on folders, filters, flags and sorting rules, and just helps you categorize email senders into three categories: “Imbox” (for Immediate or Important), “The Feed” (for newsletters or wanted marketing emails), and “The Paper Trail” (for receipts, shipping notices, etc). These three categories are… the only kinds of emails I want. So where does everything else go? Nowhere. It gets “screened out”, and you never see it. You don’t have to deal with spam folders, unsubscribing, or any of that - you just click a little thumbs down next to the email address and you never see it again.

Even without manually “screening out” senders I don’t want to hear from, Hey has some viscous spam filters built right in, and I love it. I didn’t know how great email could be until Hey nudged me to think about all relevant email as falling into these three categories. Whenever I think of a reason to email someone, I get excited! And I’ve had a blast filling my feed with fun newsletters like Dense Discovery and Fake Pixels.

In leaving social media networks (as defined by works cited in previous essays), I haven’t totally left the world of online communication behind. I’ve found communities in Slack workspaces and in Discord servers dedicated to talking about Salesforce, music, macOS productivity hacks, or NBC’s 2009-2014 SitCom Community. They’re hard to find and often require an invite, but finding ad-free, algorithm-free, low-stress chat rooms where like-minded geeks can make friends and learn new things is totally worth the hunt!

And I’ll end on a fun one! Dialup is an app where, basically, you sign up for a “line” that has a specific appointment time (say, Mondays at 8:30pm) and then at that time, you get a “phone call” from the app, which connects you to another user of the app, that is, a random stranger who also signed up for that time. So every week I get a phone call from someone with whom I’m supposed to discuss music, but the conversations are always wild. I thought everyone on the app would be a mid-20’s internet culture enthusiast, but my first conversation was with a 40 year old Brazilian business professor calling from Brazil, who had just signed divorce papers that day. We ended up talking for over an hour about life, community, commitment and empathy.

Okay! That’s it. I wanted to share my journey so that if you are considering getting off social media but can’t visualize what life would look like without it, my experience might help make that visualization is a little easier. Getting off Instagram isn’t like falling off a cliff or going to live in a hole - everything’s the same, just different.

To close with a metaphor: I’m starting to concieve social media as the highway of the internet. If you want to get in touch with people, Facebook is certainly the fastest way, but like a highway 1. it’s pretty bland, 2. you’re liable to get road rage by observing other people’s behavior, and 3. there are all kinds of unsavory advertisements dotting the path. Using the rest of the internet might be compared to getting off the highway and taking surface streets; it’s a little slower and a little less conventional, but it’s full of awesome surprises and is a much better way to see the “real” world.