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I have been thinking a lot lately about the relationship between my social media use and my addictive personality. I don’t do much social media, but I do have a profile on almost every platform and I do check them. I will tweet out a link to this newsletter post that you’re reading or listening to right now. I will post it on Facebook and Instagram and YouTube. And I will get excited if there are a bunch of retweets or new followers or friend requests.
So I am on there… but I’ve decided to be more as an observer than as a participant. That’s not an accident.
Some people can do social media. I can’t. I tried. It’s not social media’s fault; it’s me. I dabbled in posting a lot on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram but I found myself trying to get likes, overreacting positively or negatively based on who retweeted or gave me a heart emoji. I found it very similar to the way my brain started to react to drugs and alcohol. It was very addictive, and I would notice when a post or a picture wouldn’t get any traction, and then I would notice that my mood was affected. I was kind of getting high—or low—off it.
Again, I think there are lots of people out there who love social media and get a lot out of it. I see the good it does for some people. I am not one of those people. I just can’t do a lot of mood-altering things—that includes substances and other behaviors, and I would include social media as something I saw as starting to be a corrosive force in my life.
One other big thing about social media is that I caught myself being pretty fake online. And I have spent too much of my life, both before and after I got sober, pretending to be stuff that I’m not. As a kid, I wanted to be a jock around jocks, a brainiac around the smart kids, a badass around the tough kids, a troublemaker around the rowdy kids… I could keep going. Come up with a kind of kid, and I was always trying to chameleon into it around those kids. I get tired just typing about that hustle.
That carried into college and then young adulthood. It was all a scam. I was filtering my outsides in real life before you could actually filter your outsides on TikTok or Instagram.
That popped up for me a lot on April 1, because lots of people were posting jokes and pranks, and lots of other people were saying, “Hey, be careful, don’t trust what you’re seeing on social media today.” And it dawned on me that maybe you shouldn’t trust everything you see on social media ON ANY DAY, not just April 1.
I remember before I pulled the plug on most of my social media life, I posted a picture once of my family at a pumpkin patch. I think about that photo a lot, because the reality of that photo and the words I typed about that picture were completely different.
The photo was me, my wife and three kids, smiling on a beautiful fall day, all holding pumpkins. I wrote a typical dad post, about how I’d just spent a wonderful afternoon picking out the perfect pumpkin with my awesome family… blah blah blah, you’ve seen 1,000 posts like that.
Some of that was true, especially when I looked back at the photo. But here’s the truth about the photo in the moment: I was annoyed that I had to leave the TV and miss three hours of college football on a Saturday afternoon. I was sweaty because I over-dressed to be lugging kids and pumpkins around a field on a 65-degree day. I was in incredible pain because I have a limit of about 30 minutes of walking because of significant foot issues, and I did four times that, with pumpkins on my shoulders. By the time we asked someone to take a picture of us, I wanted to print the photo out, light it on fire and launch it toward Mars.
But instead… I posted it on Facebook later that night and wrote about what a fantastic day at the pumpkin patch I had just experienced.
The photo got a bunch of likes, and my kids sometimes see that picture on my phone and smile about it. So that’s good. But I didn’t love what it did to my insides, and so that is one of the last photos I did that with. I just don’t find that it feeds my spiritual condition in a helpful way.
So I’m out for the most part on social media. I still like looking at other peoples’ social feeds quite a bit, so I will be on there, lurking. And hey, I’m about six or eight weeks away from getting asked to go to a pumpkin patch, so it’s entirely possible I end up posting a stream of photos that are b******t. But I’ll take it one day at a time…
This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:
HEARD AT MEETINGS....
After my first meeting, I went home and told my wife, "Hey, they were kind of nice. They invited me back for next time."
She replied, "You go right back and see those people, because nobody's invited you back anywhere in the last 10 years!"
(Credit: AA Grapevine, by Anonymous, October 2005)
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