WHY I LESSENED MY TIME ON SOCIAL MEDIA
1. There was a point in my life when I was sorta obsessed with keeping track of other people's lives. I don't know why. I just was, and it didn't make me feel better about myself. It made me feel bad about myself and sorta sad. Why? I compared my life to the lives of other people. I asked myself things like...why aren't you doing something cool with your life right now? Like why, oh Cassey, why are you watching another episode of The Office when you can be doing something else? Why aren't you hanging out with your friends? Do you even HAVE friends? These questions hurt...even when I know that I'm freaking kick-butt awesome, that I have friends, and that another episode of The Office isn't harmless. These feelings were weird feelings, and I just wanted them to stop.
2. I realized that I don't have to share moments of my life with the world to make them matter. Me posting pictures online doesn't make any parts of my life any cooler or more exciting. It doesn't make me feel better about myself in any way. So why worry about doing it all the time? ...because that's what I was doing: worrying about how others perceived my life through a screen. And honestly, that's ridiculous! Like I read that back to myself as I write this, and I just scoff because--my goodness--that's just so sad. No one should be worrying about how people perceive them. Period. And yes, that's another whole dragon to defeat, but it starts with not worrying about how people see you through a screen.
3. Basically, social media is not productive to the person I want to become. It's not. I've said this a lot in this post, but it's so important: I want to do things for myself. It's all about personal edification for me. I want to only do things that build me up, and social media did not do that for me. When I share things on my blog and Facebook, I share them because they mean a lot to me and I want to remember them.
4. Social media is not productive in general. Seriously, have you ever wondered how much time you spend on social media? Like do you know how long it takes to scroll through an Instagram feed? Or how many seconds it takes to review other peoples' Snapchat stories? It's a LONG time! You can be doing so so so much better things than that. You can be going on a hike, playing outside, learning new hobbies, writing a blog, or whatever else your amazing mind can come up with.
WHAT I HAVE GAINED
1. More "me" time. I seriously spend so much time doing my own thing that it's great. When I'm not working, I'm doing whatever I want to do, and it's nice.
2. More time with my family. Really just my mom. She's great!
3. A better perspective. I've already touched on this, but I'm gonna mention it again...Only do things that make you feel better about you, whatever that is. You know what makes me feel better about me? Netflix. Books. Blogs. Exercise. Work. Basically anything that's not social media.
Now now now, I want to note that this post may or may not be hypocritical considering that I am sitting here and writing this. BUT I hope that you did gain something from this post. I think it is so important for us to take a second and evaluate what sort of role social media plays in our lives. Seriously, do it. I found that it played more of a negative role than a positive one, and so I pulled myself away from it (not completely, but enough for right now). I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels that way, so maybe you should too.
To show that I am not that much of a hypocrite, here's some pics of me and my amazing friend, Emma, who has also lessened her time on social media. We went to Pilot Mountain today to chill out and be adventurous! So we went kayaking...for about fifteen minutes...after I saw a river monster (or rock?? almost positive it was a river monster though tbh). Then, we went on this trail part of the mountain; saw deer, bunnies, lots of bugs, and a snake; and tried to be artsy with these pics. We ended up just being awkward goofs, but I hope you enjoy these pics anyways :-)
I also wanted to take the time to mention that Emma is such a great example to me, and I love her a lot. Tbh, I'm kinda sad HF placed her in my life at such a late time (I literally just met her a few months ago!!), but I know He has His own reasons. I'll miss her so much while she's doing amazing things (i.e. meeting hot returned-missionaries) at BYU Hawaii. I'll visit ya sometime, Em ;-)
