We don’t realize how much white space we have in our lives, white space that we fill up with all of this noise. All of this Interent and news and social media and likes and follows and filters. All of the things we are doing all day to stay on brand and to keep our brand going.
And I’m not just saying this to business owners who have online brands. I’m saying this to all of us who are posting to social media with pictures and comments and statueses. We’re all keeping to a certain brand that we’ve created for ourselves. And it takes effort to do that. It’s a job. You’re a fulltime brand manager.
When I eliminated those social media from my life, I was able to take a step back and realize how spacious my life really was. I got to witness all of the white space that we fill up with this garbage.
We do have the space to stop and witness our lives and to take breaths and to think and to unload what’s in our head and to watch and be still. There is that white space working around us. And once it’s emptied out we can use it to our advantage. That’s what I thnk I’ve been doing more of since getting off social media and staying off social media consciously.
The effort that we put in to staying in the know and being the first to know and to always be in touch and to not be missing anything ever, it is exhausting. I’ve heard people tell me that’s a legitimate fear they have. That freaks me out. Since signing off, I’ve had people message me saying things like “I want to get off social media because it makes me feel horrible, but I’m too afraid of missing something”.
People ask me, “aren’t you afraid of missing something?” And I say…NO. I want to be missing things. That’s why I’m off. I want to miss them. I don’t want them in my face anymore.
The truth is, being off of social media, I will miss out on some things. I’ll not be the first to know when a big event happens because I’m not scrolling through Facebook. But I am consuming news other ways. I listen to NPR everyday in the car. I’m subscribed to podcasts. I follow blogs on Bloglovin’ and consume content that way. I still read about the news and the events and the happiness and the tragidies. I’m still apart of the world. I stay current. I can hold my own in debates and I’m informed and I’m educated. And I don’t need Facebook to do that.
For all these years, people didn’t need Facebook to stay in the know and to stay in touch. There are other ways to consume news, other ways to stay connected.Social media has just made is stupidly simple and way too convineint. Its like fast food, for your brain. Easy? Yes. Better? No.
Right now, the news that we are consuming (especially the way we are cosnuming it) is so vile. It’s toxic. It’s not informing us, not keeping us educated. It’s dumbing us down, scaring us, keeping us small and trapped. It’s not giving us the space to think and extrapolate and grow and come up with informed opinions and decisions.
I didn’t like that, so I wanted to stop and try a different way.
I wanted to do something a little different with my newsletter this week. I’ve been researching why so many people stay on social media even though they complain about how it makes them feel. And the general consensus is…FOMO.
I want to create content and share it online, but I don’t want to use the social media machine to do it. And I keep running into the same pesky little question…how?
My first step was to brainstorm what keeps people on social media. So far, I’ve found these 4 things:
- constant content
- pretty pictures
- news
- relatable stories
Now my next step was to figure out a way for my blog to offer this. That way, anyone else who wants to stay connected but stay off of social media can have an outlet to turn to when the FOMO kicks in.
Of course, now we’re back to the “how”. I’ll be playing with this idea for the next few weeks to see where it takes me. And I invite you to brainstorm with me as I try to craft a way to beat the FOMO for those of us who’ve had it with the scary stories, filtered photos and fake smiles.
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