Why I (almost) Returned to Social Media

A vintage reflection I wrote to think through the role Facebook played in my life

During my novitiate year with the Companions of the Cross in 2018, I took an indefinite break from social media. A few months after the year finished, I decided to come back, and this was going to be the Facebook status I posted after a year long absence. Ultimately I didn’t go through with coming back to Facebook, and so I shelved this piece. Maybe one day I’ll write about why. In the meantime, I’m still proud of what I’ve written here, and a lot of it still resonates with me. I hope it can provoke some thought about how we can cultivate a healthy relationship with media.

You should get off social media.

I know, I know, 99.9% of people reading this who aren’t my Mom will have found it on Facebook because I posted it there using my personal account which I don’t plan on getting rid of any time soon. And yes, this is a blog post explaining (rationalizing?) why I’m back on. I guess I’m opening with this suggestion because while I’m back on Facebook, and I think that’s ultimately a good thing, I know that there are major and vastly under-appreciated drawbacks to social media, and so I want to temper my endorsement. Let’s just say I highly recommend taking some time to at least seriously consider quitting, if not forever, at least for an extended period of time.

I’m not going to rehash these drawbacks, which you most likely are not only well aware of, but have personally experienced yourself. Even at the height of my social media use, I (as I suspect many people who use social media) knew it was an enormous and mostly unnecessary drain on my time, ability to focus, sense of connection with others, satisfaction with my own life etc. Instead I’ll briefly recap my nine month hiatus, why it was so awesome, and then I’ll explain why I came back.

Nine Months off the Grid

In August I became a seminarian (i.e. a man preparing to become a Catholic priest) with a community called the Companions of the Cross. Before beginning formal studies, the first year seminarians (called applicants) embark on an eight month program designed to foster personal and spiritual growth. The program consists of a structured life of prayer, in house studies, fraternal life, and labor. To help us enter more fully into each of these aspects of our formation year, we were asked to limit ourselves to 30 minutes of phone and internet per week. While we weren’t required to get rid of social media altogether, I decided to take this as an opportunity to go on an extended hiatus from Facebook, Instagram, and Youtube. They were taking up an embarrassing portion of my free time, and I knew I would benefit from a detox.

The benefits were striking. I experienced an intense feeling of connection and appreciation for the people in my life despite having vastly reduced contact with most of them. My appetite and capacity for reading went through the roof; I went from considering it completely unattainable to read than a book per month, to regularly polishing off a book a week. I found that learning new skills and concepts came easier than ever before, and overall my senses (e.g. taste, smell, noticing details of my environment/the people around me) were heightened to a degree that I have rarely experienced.

While not the most meaningful, the most impressive effect was how much I now noticed facial features and hair styles. For a few months I was wondering why I was suddenly seeing doppelgängers everywhere. I then realized it was because I was now much more aware of how people wore their hair, and what their faces actually looked like. Sometimes these similarities are obvious, but now I was able to notice very minor and subtle similarities that would immediately call my mind to people I knew. At first this was a bit unnerving; the people I know and love aren’t as unique as I thought they were! But I then saw this as an opportunity to see, know, and love the people in my life for the things that truly make them unique.

Was all of this purely due to being off Facebook and youtube? Probably not. Those eight months were a radical, intense, and unique experience that can’t properly be compared to any situation resembling daily life. But what I do know is that that during my time in formation the one thing that was most significantly different about my life was that I now had an incredible amount of emotional and mental bandwidth freed up from not checking and being stimulated by online entertainment all the time.

By coming back to social media, I think I’m going in the opposite direction of what will be a huge movement in the very near future. In reflecting on my time off social media, I’ve often thought of the psychologist Timothy Leary. In the 1960’s he popularized the slogan ‘Turn on, drop out, tune in’ for the hippie generation. I suspect that the next great countercultural motto will be something along the lines of ‘turn off, drop in, tune out.’ Even Pope Francis predicted that twitter culture will inspire a rise in monasticism. Having just recently spent eight months in semi-semi monastic life, I firmly believe he Is correct.

Why I Came Back

At this point you may be thinking, if being on Facebook was so bad, and leaving it was so good, why are you back?

To start, one of the things I learned during my formation year was to take responsibility for my happiness. I came to this thought via much prayer and reflection, being made aware of and lovingly encouraged to face my struggles and weaknesses, and through reading works by authors like Hugh Prather, Stephen Covey, and Jordan Peterson. One point in particular which I grasped at a deep level of understanding was that people and circumstances don’t make me unhappy, rather, my negative emotional reactions to those people and circumstances make me unhappy.

While I have many good science based reasons to blame social media for draining my happiness and attention, I see now that ultimately I was draining myself of happiness and attention by substituting online entertainment for genuine social connection and full mental engagement. I turned internet distractions into a way to avoid dealing with the anxiety, boredom, and shame that I faced in my daily life, and I paid a hefty price for it. But now I have a vastly increased handle on that shame, boredom, and anxiety, and an increased understanding of how my social media use contributed to these things. I now believe I’m in a better position to use and handle social media, albeit one that not everyone, (including myself nine months ago) is in.

But at this point you may have noticed that I’ve only mitigated the negative consequences of Facebook, are there any actual good reasons to use it? Whether there are good reasons and whether they outweigh the bad will vary from person to person. For me it came down to two factors:

1. My responsibility to develop and share my gifts

In the winter we took a seminar called ‘Called and Gifted’ by Sherry Weddell. In it we studied and focused on the fact that we each possess particular, God given gifts. What struck me the most from this seminar was the idea that we we have a right and responsibility to use our gifts. A right, because we cannot fully flourish as individuals without exercising them. A responsibility, because these gifts are not meant for ourselves; that there are people out there who need our gifts. During the sermon on the mount Jesus admonished us not to hide our light under a bushel. This sense of responsibility, this idea that other people need my gifts, has given me an extra boost needed to overcome (for now) the fear of rejection, false humility, and flat out laziness that has held me back from sharing my writing.

I can’t ultimately know for sure whether I have a genuine spiritual gift for writing. But what I do know is that when I was writing my blog I received regular feedback from people who said that they greatly appreciated my writing, and that it made a positive impact on their lives. This brings me to the second factor:

2. The platform Facebook provides

Traffic to my blog was almost entirely driven by social media. These people I mentioned would never have come across, and been helped by my writing had I not posted it to social media. For all of Facebook’s pitfalls and drawbacks, in no other domain of my life can I communicate with hundreds, and potentially thousands (even millions if it goes viral) of people. At this point in my life, in my particular situation, Facebook gives me a platform and an opportunity for access to people that is too broad to pass up.

This isn’t a one way street. People are out there who need my gifts, and people are out there who need your gifts. Can you imagine how much better Facebook would be if everyone used it in an intentional manner, and as a vehicle to share their passions and gifts? At the beginning of this post I suggested that you seriously consider quitting social media. Here at the end, I hope you’ll also take the time to seriously consider making it better. Thats what I’m trying to do, and that’s why I came back to social media.