The Go Slow Life and Social Media
I had my first social media page in the year 2000. This was long before MySpace or Facebook were mainstream or even invented for that matter. I made myself a Geocities page all about me, and posted pictures of myself and my friends. It was by today's standards an atrocity of html with blinking fonts, and swirling "click here" buttons, but I thought it was fun and a neat pastime.
Then, twelve years ago I first joined Facebook. It was an incredible experience reconnecting with high school and college friends that I had since lost touch with. I can remember being excited to go online after work each day to see who else I could find and reconnect with.
Now, fast forward to 2019, the uses for these types of services have dramatically changed, and Facebook (and other such social media sites) have monetized your attention span. Algorithms have hacked into our psychological reward systems and have given us reason to keep scrolling, keep clicking, keep viewing.
For this very reason, even although I was an early and avid adopter of social media, The Go Slow Life requires that you are extraordinarily judicious about how much time you spend on social media.
Social Media and The Go Slow Life are not incompatible, but the commonplace activity of constant scrolling, uploading, snapchatting and liking are not activities that we should be filling our time with.
The Go Slow Life wishes for you to see and experience the world around you and when you are lost in your screen, you are far more likely to miss out on what happens around you. There is a lot of beauty around you.
Scrolling through your phone, you will miss holding the door for the person behind you - a small but never unnecessary gesture. You will miss the smell of the flowers as you walk into your workplace. You will miss the opportunity to greet a stranger with a kind smile.
You will overlook a tremendous number of things, but the way I see it, the worst thing about it is that you won't even realize what you skimmed right past. The entire beauty of the real, live world will pass you by, and instead your scope of awareness will be limited to mostly advertisements, carefully curated imagery and memes.
I'm not saying there's anything evil with this kind of media consumption, but it must be deliberate. It must be a deliberate choice. There are so many ways in which Social Media can draw you in to where you are no longer making the deliberate choice to engage, and that's where it becomes a slippery slope.
The Go Slow Life seeks to create ease and purpose through living in the present. Escaping the present reality through Social Media becomes incompatible with The Go Slow Life.
If you find yourself in a behavior pattern where you fill your free time with social media, I encourage you to take the following steps:
1) Take a 30 day Social Media Detox hiatus. Delete the apps from your phone, sign off, sign out. You will feel weird for the first few days (maybe even a week), but give it 30 days off.
2) Once you've reached that 30 days, take inventory about how your life is different without social media.
3) The ways in which your life is different, evaluate whether social media enhanced it or detracted from it.
4) In the most discerning way possible, choose carefully which social media platforms you wish to reintroduce. Limit it to certain places (e.g desktop computer only) and certain times (e.g. 10 minutes per week).
5) Ruthlessly unfollow/unfriend anybody who does not enhance your enjoyment or functionality of the site.
6) Reevaluate constantly. If a social media site that you reintroduced stops working for you, delete it again.
We are given a short and wonderful time on this planet. Don't trade your irreplaceable time for Facebook's stock profits.
xo
Chase
P.S. For more reading on this, check out Cal Newport's Digital Minimalism
Then, twelve years ago I first joined Facebook. It was an incredible experience reconnecting with high school and college friends that I had since lost touch with. I can remember being excited to go online after work each day to see who else I could find and reconnect with.
Now, fast forward to 2019, the uses for these types of services have dramatically changed, and Facebook (and other such social media sites) have monetized your attention span. Algorithms have hacked into our psychological reward systems and have given us reason to keep scrolling, keep clicking, keep viewing.
For this very reason, even although I was an early and avid adopter of social media, The Go Slow Life requires that you are extraordinarily judicious about how much time you spend on social media.
Social Media and The Go Slow Life are not incompatible, but the commonplace activity of constant scrolling, uploading, snapchatting and liking are not activities that we should be filling our time with.
The Go Slow Life wishes for you to see and experience the world around you and when you are lost in your screen, you are far more likely to miss out on what happens around you. There is a lot of beauty around you.
Scrolling through your phone, you will miss holding the door for the person behind you - a small but never unnecessary gesture. You will miss the smell of the flowers as you walk into your workplace. You will miss the opportunity to greet a stranger with a kind smile.
You will overlook a tremendous number of things, but the way I see it, the worst thing about it is that you won't even realize what you skimmed right past. The entire beauty of the real, live world will pass you by, and instead your scope of awareness will be limited to mostly advertisements, carefully curated imagery and memes.
I'm not saying there's anything evil with this kind of media consumption, but it must be deliberate. It must be a deliberate choice. There are so many ways in which Social Media can draw you in to where you are no longer making the deliberate choice to engage, and that's where it becomes a slippery slope.
The Go Slow Life seeks to create ease and purpose through living in the present. Escaping the present reality through Social Media becomes incompatible with The Go Slow Life.
If you find yourself in a behavior pattern where you fill your free time with social media, I encourage you to take the following steps:
1) Take a 30 day Social Media Detox hiatus. Delete the apps from your phone, sign off, sign out. You will feel weird for the first few days (maybe even a week), but give it 30 days off.
2) Once you've reached that 30 days, take inventory about how your life is different without social media.
3) The ways in which your life is different, evaluate whether social media enhanced it or detracted from it.
4) In the most discerning way possible, choose carefully which social media platforms you wish to reintroduce. Limit it to certain places (e.g desktop computer only) and certain times (e.g. 10 minutes per week).
5) Ruthlessly unfollow/unfriend anybody who does not enhance your enjoyment or functionality of the site.
6) Reevaluate constantly. If a social media site that you reintroduced stops working for you, delete it again.
We are given a short and wonderful time on this planet. Don't trade your irreplaceable time for Facebook's stock profits.
xo
Chase
P.S. For more reading on this, check out Cal Newport's Digital Minimalism
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