Quitting.

For my 40th birthday this week, I'm giving myself a gift — quitting social media. All of it.

I’ll be honest, I’ve been kicking around the idea of quitting social media for a long time. For those who know me well, this doesn't come as any surprise — we’ve had lengthy conversations about it over the course of the last year, maybe more. At the very least, there have been wistful sighs of potential relief when the idea comes up, and the wistful sighs have happened pretty often.

At the risk of sounding cliche, turning forty makes you think about some things. I know the age of forty isn’t a hard line, or some sort of definitive precipice between the first and second halves of life — but it’s culturally seen that way. It can bring one pause; it certainly has for me.

My decision to quit social media was made through an optimistic perspective, though I confess, it took a bit to get there. The question was less, “What am I missing by being on social media?” But more, “What could I gain if I quit?” What does my physical, social, emotional, and spiritual life look like without it? I honestly didn’t know.

I joined The Facebook (don’t laugh, it really had “the” at the beginning!) as a senior at the University of Colorado 18 years ago. I’ve been on some form of a modern social media platform ever since (not to mention MySpace before that, AOL before that…). Since I joined Facebook almost two decades ago, I got married, we had two kids, moved 10+ times, lived in 3 different states, helped plant a church, got kicked out of a church, almost lost our marriage, saved our marriage, went to grad school, finished grad school, had approximately 396 career changes (that was just me), received what seems like the same number of diagnoses for one kid, succeeded at some things, failed at even more, and everything else you could possibly imagine.

All of that happened, and I posted about it all on the internet for the last 18 years, using Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

I need a break.

So on Friday, January 13th, I’m unplugging.

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The technology that powers social media has changed dramatically, too, and the motivators for these businesses are now anything but benevolent. Social media companies have no other business model than keeping us scrolling, and scrolling, and scrolling for as long as possible. That’s it. That’s the whole thing. The more we scroll, the more dollars they make, so they are incentivized to use our psychology against us in order to keep us on their platforms. None of this is news.

The problems therein are endless, but allow me a moment to make this about myself. My psychology can’t withstand that kind of manipulation. I am a prime target for their methods and after 18 years of being programmed to think through the lens of likes and shares, I am relentlessly addicted to social media.

As my friend Seth says, “we’re all drunk on something.”¹

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I sent out an email to all of my directees telling them about my quitting social media and one of the most frequent questions was, “Will you write about why for the rest of us?” I’ll attempt to do that over the course of the next couple of weeks. I’ll break it down into the following angles, give or take a few:

• Time & Attention

• Parenting

• Profit, Privacy, Provocation

• Misinformation

• The Soul’s Price

• What I’ll Miss the Most

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I’ll answer a few questions here at the outset:

1. Are you quitting social media forever?

   Forever is a long time, pal. I still haven’t picked out what I want to cook for dinner tonight, let alone how I’ll feel about social media forever. Here’s what I do know: I’m committed to taking the full year off of social media. 12 months, 365 days. I can commit to that for now.

2. Is your husband quitting social media with you?

   In moments, Erik has lamented being on social media, but he’s also in a position where he can’t quit. When you’re a business owner that does a lot of marketing via social channels, you don’t really have that luxury. I’ll talk about this in a future entry — too much of small business success is riding on principles that don’t serve the common good, and business owners are trapped in a vortex they can’t escape, even if they desperately wanted to.

3. Will you share the resources you’ve read/watched/listened to that helped you make the decision?

   You bet. I’ll make sure to include footnotes in each newsletter (different sources impacted the different angles above), and I’ll compile all of them into one list at the end.

4. Are you just deleting the apps off your phone?

   No, I’m fully deactivating my accounts. I don’t have the self control to only delete the app off my phone — I would just use the browser, or visit the sites on my laptop later. If the accounts aren’t there to access, it’s just easier. Thankfully, there are deactivation options where I can come back later & still have my accounts intact, but I’ll be downloading my data as a backup.

5. What do you hope will happen?

   After taking at least a year off social media, I’m hoping for more presence in relationships, greater focus & attention, more creativity, less stress & anxiety, less competition and comparison, and greater spiritual formation. I realize that’s a pretty tall order. At the very least, I hope to read more books, go on more walks, and give more of my attention to my family. I’m looking forward to knowing what it’s like to take a picture of my kids for the sake of having a good photo of my kids, rather than taking a photo of my kids & immediately thinking about what caption I can write to get the most likes & shares.

6. Are you nervous?

   Sort of, yes. It’s hard to imagine being completely unplugged from social media after so many years. I like knowing how things are going to go… so there’s some anxiety around the unexpected.

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I don’t know how this is going to go and that’s part of the adventure. Will this connect me more to the people around me? Will I miss it? What will I learn about myself, about others, about God? Maybe I’ll quit for a few months and come running back with my tail between my legs, but if the last three years of alcohol sobriety has taught me anything about myself, it’s that hell yeah, I can do really difficult things and see them through.

While I’ll write about the intersection of tech, culture, politics, and spiritual formation in this space, I’ll also write about my birthday gift of being social-media free throughout the next year.

The countdown is on, four more days. Better go scroll while I can.

1. Seth Haines has written some of my favorite things about sobriety, including his two books, Coming Clean and The Book of Waking Up. You can read his wonderful newsletter here.