For those who celebrate the season of Lent, every year poses the question of "what should I give up this year?" It may be easy for some that follow a tradition to give up the same thing every year, but for others this can be quite a difficult decision. Last year was one of those years for me. I tried to think of something that would challenge me and would make me feel proud of if I could successfully pull it off. Then the idea hit me to give up every platform of social media possible. Unheard of, right?!
A lot of people doubted that I could actually last forty days without social media but I was determined to prove them wrong. I was very strict with this idea and did not give myself any room for cheating. I shut off twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, and Tumblr--everything that I could think of and did not give myself a "free" day on Sundays. I was completely shut out from how my generation likes to communicate. I wanted to completely cleanse myself from the toxic habits I had developed becoming so dependent on my phone and social media.
At the beginning of my cleanse, I felt confused and bored. I did not realize how much time I actually waste going back and forth between five different websites, checking for updates and deciding when the prime time to post my own update was. For some reason, it was so important to me to always know what was going around in my social network. So now I was forced to find something else to do. I noticed myself becoming more conscious of my time and making a better use of it. I started to actually go to the gym, get my homework done far before the last minute, and get a significantly higher amount of sleep. I was feeling a lot better about myself and did not miss anything about not being active online.
I found myself valuing face-to-face conversations a lot more and legitimately reaching out to people instead of commenting on their pictures or responding to a random tweet or post. Obviously, I was not looking at anyone's pictures or posts, but the point was that I was communicating more effectively which led to actually meeting up with someone instead of just saying we were going to. That was how I spent a lot of the time that social media had absorbed without me even noticing. I also had so much more fun not living on my phone. I was not worried about taking the "perfect picture" or updating people about what I was doing; I just lived freely in the moment. It was a relaxing change and it made me start to wonder why I used to care so much about people knowing what I was doing.
Realizing that the world does not revolve around how I look on social media was extremely eye-opening. I think that a lot of my generation tends to assume things based upon what people post online but I learned that there is so much more to it than that. Because I was not keeping up with what everyone was doing, we had a lot more to talk about. I was given stories and feelings about experiences that were failed to be told from just a picture of what happened. It meant a lot more to hear about what someone did and in my opinion, enriched the friendship even more.
When Easter arrived, I was excited to see what I missed out on from the past forty days but found that it was close to nothing. Going backwards to view posts from stories that I had heard about already in person was confusing and boring. I stopped my search and it was refreshing to not care as much as I used to. And even now a year later, I do not depend on social media to define myself and I could care less about how impressive or interesting my life appears to be online. I definitely still use social media but in a healthier way and with a different perspective. I would absolutely recommend challenging yourself to something like this if you find yourself too dependent on social media or unhappy with how much time you waste not living life to the fullest extent. It really did change me for the better and I am so happy I pushed myself to do it.
