Status update

A few years ago I ran into an acquaintance at an event. I hadn’t seen her in a couple of years but we carried on a conversation as though we’d talked just last week. It went something like this. How was your vacation? The pictures looked fabulous! You kids are getting so big. Congratulations on your new job!

As we walked away my husband remarked that he didn’t know we’d kept in touch. Facebook, I explained. The highlight reel of our lives. Carefully curated for the highest yield of likes. I had to admit, it was weird, the exchange this woman and I had. How did life get to the point that I was hyper aware of what near-stranger/acquaintances were up to? How much unnecessary information was taking up valuable real estate in my brain?

On another occasion I sat around with a group of friends. A similar conversation took place as we asked about various updates we had all posted. We seemed to already know what each other had been up to since we last got together, or at least what we wanted our vast network of “friends” to know. It didn’t feel authentic or spontaneous or real. But as with good friendships, we soon found our way to the real heart of the matter and shared about our aging parents, our issues with getting our kids to do homework, our hard truths.

A couple years ago I gave up social media for six weeks. You know what I found when I returned at the end of my fast? I wasn’t missing out and I wasn’t missed. It was a good experiment because when I did log back on, I wasn’t obsessively checking it throughout the day. It gave me perspective about how much time I was wasting on something that wasn’t really connecting me to people (although it’s suppose to make you feel like you are). I loved getting together with friends and really hearing for the first time, face to face, what they had been up to in the last few weeks.

Since that time, I still struggle with how much social media to use. Sometimes I swear it off altogether and sometimes I can’t wait to post something. There are benefits too because I find out things I wouldn’t otherwise hear about there. I follow a lot of positive thinkers which inspires me. Facebook has become our new community newspaper where we learn about births and deaths and our friends accomplishments.  We can quickly get information out to our entire network or a small group. It has become part of the fabric of life.

During our technology reset, I’ve stepped away from social media again. I deleted all time-sucking apps from my phone (including games) and I conservatively estimate the time savings to be about an hour and a half a day. It could be more. I’m not going to save the world with the time I’m saving but it’s giving our family the time it needs to re-connect with each other. And I’m finding I really kick butt at Boggle!

We have also been doing a lot of reading on the effects of constantly be connected with technology. It’s pretty scary stuff, how addicting our phones, iPads and laptops are. It has reinforced why this break is necessary and gives us the time to come up with a strategy when we inevitably decide to plug back in.

MC

Some links on our technology reset:

Reset Your Child’s Brain
Glow Kids
Simon Sinek on Millenials and technology (YouTube)