If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you already know how I feel about social media. As a culture, we have become enmeshed with posting our “highlight reel” and curated life online. It’s fun to post things online, but far too many of us are preoccupied with likes and comments because we crave that external confirmation that we are good enough. We care about how our life appears, more than how it really is.
Remember that if you live for people’s acceptance, you will die from their rejection. The only approval and validation you need is from yourself. And once you break away from focusing on what people think of you externally, a whole new freedom comes about in your life.
I’ve noticed that for me, when I was active on social media years ago, I did care about how my life looked to others. I wasn’t posting about my family issues or serious fights with my husband. I didn’t want people to see me as a mess or that my life was out of control.
When I stopped being as active on social media, a funny thing happened. All of a sudden, I had a lot more time to sit with my uncomfortable feelings of how my life really felt. I wasn’t distracting myself from my feelings when I was curating my life in social media posts and videos. I was left sitting with my reality, which prompted me to make some serious changes.
I’ve been off social media now for going on ten years. I don’t have any personal accounts, just business/brand accounts that I’ve created that are super specific to the brand, like Mindset Made Better. It would actually be advantageous for me to have a personal account and promote this website on it, but I would rather grow it organically and stay off the platforms personally.
When I think about how my life has unfolded over the last decade, it’s pretty unbelievable. I’ve had some incredible experiences and I have been so blessed with opportunities to travel all over the country and be in nature. And not a second of it has been documented on social media.
To be completely honest, at first there was a part of my brain that was like, “don’t you want to share what you are experiencing with others? This is amazing content! Don’t you want people to see these adventures?” But for me, these feelings faded quickly. I asked myself what my real motivation was. Was it to show how great my life was? Was it another highlight reel I wanted to queue up and project out into the world? What kind of feeling does doing that really give me? Do I feel connected to people? Or does it make me feel kind of empty or like I am bragging?
We’ve shared photos and videos with friends and family from various trips, but they are a small group of people we know in person and have real-life relationships with. In these years, I have learned to value my privacy and focus on how my life feels, rather than how it looks.
