No Social Media For A Year by TM O'Leary
On September 1, 2019 I quit social media. Twitter was the final domino to fall. I was hooked on it. For 10 years it was almost all I did. Prior to that, I quit Instagram (one week before). Earlier still, I left facebook (2014), and never missed it. Snapchat, Tik Tok, Pinterest, etc. – I never fooled with. During this past year I tried some others out – Mastodon, Pixelfed, and even had a profile on the Scuttlebutt network at one point. But, they were all the same: time wasters that siphoned away my quality of life, made me anxious about “who said what, and when”, and ultimately gave me a FOMO that was equivalent to that which I faced on the “Big” tech companies social networks. With more free time, and becoming more aware of that free time, I decided to do some writing. A lot of it. Mostly on Write.as, but also wrote a longform about my time away ([Unmedia](https://write.as/unmedia)), and even a micro-manifesto about a better political system (Ideas for a Better Way (which is saved offline as a PDF)). I edited, re-drafted, and improved a short fiction story (Metro (another offline PDF)), started working out (lost 30 pounds), and even got back into weight training (via resistance bands). I also made some nice little Web widgets on Carrd.co ([Thanx](https://thanx.cc), [BYEsocial](https://byesocial.carrd.co), and [General Disclaimer](https://generaldisclaimer.carrd.co) What now? The “goal” here is to just keep living my life. I have no desire to return to the atrocious dumpster fire of social networks. Any of them. The answer to “what now?” is, I don't know! Some say life starts outside your comfort zone. I say life starts when you stop using social networks. Seems too simple, but if it were so simple, MANY more people would delete their accounts. Who cares? To be honest, I don't know that, either! I never will know if anyone cares that I, or you, or anybody else decides to leave social media. There are no “kudos”, or fanfare – and hell, even my therapist expresses a proverbial “Yawn” when I tell her that I no longer send Tweets. Social media is small, X amount of time spent on it makes it LOOK big. But it isn't anything special. Conclusion Consider this blog post akin to a “My First Year Sober” post, which if you are a writer, and newly sober, I suggest you do. I just wanted to have a mile-marker for my first 365 days without a social platform. Nothing to tend to, worry about, develop a neurosis from, or anything. Just being alive