Unplugged.

I just finished a month without social media on my phone. [I survived, who would've guessed?!]

The night of November 1st, I came across Essena O'Neill's video announcing she had deleted all social media & it struck a chord with me in a major way.

Contentment in your 20's, I've found, is a hard thing to rest in. We are always striving for more, for better. Sometimes not for a sense of personal achievement, but simply for the pleasure of sharing those successes. I think social media fuels this.

This drive has the ability to be the most positive breeder of success or the polar opposite. It can generate insecurity while pushing the need to keep up with whoever you deem as "goals".

After looking at the amount of time I spent in a week on each app in my Settings,
(Settings >> General >> Battery >> Battery Usage. It's an eye opener.)
I decided to make a change.

No Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or my true weakness, Instagram, on my phone for one month.

Here are five things I learned about myself, my relationships & my generation:

1. Physical presence does not a relationship make - Accepting that I spent more quality time with my phone than with people hit me hard. Screen time even trumped down time with my friends. Without realizing it, I had let so many of my relationships fall into a place of passive friendship. I was paying more attention to my phone & social media than to my relationships. Not having the ability to look at anything on my phone forced both reflection & interaction. Time off allowed me to audit [see Bo, I know what you do] my close relationships. It's easy to see where communication gaps are when social media stops being a factor. Now, when I am with my friends I am not just physically present, but actively engaged in both conversation & whatever we are doing. 
2. Twitter is not the news - Replacing scrolling through social media in the mornings with reading The Skimm [go subscribe now. seriously.] & several newspaper apps opened my eyes in a big way. It allowed me to not only form an opinion on hot button issues, but to constantly test my stance & viewpoint by reading papers I both aligned with & disagreed with. Reading things you vehemently oppose don't agree with is the best way to challenge yourself & broaden your worldview.
3. Social media does not actually make you social - It never occurred to me that I use my phone as a crutch. It has always been my safety net in social situations. If I didn't know anyone I would sit & scroll through Instagram, my Facebook newsfeed, event Pinterest if the situation was dire. Being forced to interact - especially when uncomfortable - has had a permanent impact. I look at the new friendships I have developed & people I have met this month knowing I would not have interacted with any of them in the same way before this twisted little experiment.
4. I care way too much - This was the hardest one for me to accept. I realized that I cared more about how strangers on the internet perceived me than about my personal relationships. The first week my mind drifted nonstop to a stream of worry about what people were thinking. [I went radio silent without warning, what would people think about me not posting at least once every few days? Would my friends think I was mad at them because I wasn't liking their posts? Would people unfollow me?] 
5. The real world is fun -  I think as a generation we're so consumed with putting perfectly edited clips of our lives out there & packaging them just-so that we end up losing out on the experiences we're having when they're happening. It's great to have pictures & videos to look back on, but at what point should we sacrifice the actual experience for a captured image? 

Today is my 30 day mark & I'm questioning re-adding my apps. A happy medium exists, but there is a freeing feeling involved with not feeling such an attachment to your phone. So for now, I'll stick to checking for Doug the Pug updates from Facebook on my laptop.

Judge me or join me.

xx, Natalie