Social media exhausted me again.

If I’m more self-reflective I guess I have to say I exhausted myself on social media again.

Back a year ago in November I did a social media fast. For two months I was off Facebook and Twitter altogether. When I came back to it I pared back my Twitter follows, from ~600 to ~300.

In March, after the latest Facebook privacy mess, I decided it was time to be done with Facebook. And so I deactivated my Facebook account.

But over the last few months I’ve let them sneak back up on me.

I had the best intentions - my church’s online community (mid-week announcements, reminders, prayer requests, etc) are all on a closed Facebook group. I also enjoy the Christ and Pop Culture Facebook group. But it turns out I don’t really enjoy Facebook that much, and if I have it on my phone it keeps sucking me in.

Twitter I’m more attached to. I have friends that I’ve made and kept in contact with almost exclusively on social media, and I keep thinking how much I don’t want to lose track of them. But then Geof deleted his Twitter account, and Stephen and Misty are rarely on it anymore, and Dan much more rarely, and John almost never. I feel there’s an opportunity here to still have interaction with online and distant friends… but we’ve apparently all decided as a group that Facebook and Twitter aren’t the right thing for it anymore. (If you guys are all running some Friends and Family Slack group and you haven’t invited me…)

I still do find some value on Twitter, but I’ve gotta cut my follows hard again. The Kavanaugh thing sucked me in again to where politics attained an outsized priority compared to everything else. I know better… but wow it sucks me in.

So, here’s to less frenzy on social media, and more focus on things that matter (acknowledging that some of those things might actually still happen on social media!). Maybe I’ll do some more blogging. And if we need to resurrect a phpBB forum or something to interact with distant friends, maybe let’s do that, eh?