SOCIAL MEDIA SUNDAY

“When a person can’t find a deep sense of meaning, they distract themselves with pleasure.” – Viktor Frankl

How much time do you spend on social media?

Probably a lot more than you would be willing to admit to a stranger.

How do you feel when you spend multiple hours watching other people’s stories and posts?

My guess would be not well.

So why do you spend so much time on social media?

I have to ask myself this question daily and the answer is: boredom.

Especially when it’s the weekend and you have no work responsibilities. A few days to relax and do what I call NOTHING.

But what if you could do SOMETHING?

Something other than post and scroll through your feed or lie on the couch binge watching shows.

What about spending some uninterrupted time with your family. Giving the people you love your undivided attention. Going on an adventure. Taking a long walk or hike. Embracing the outdoors, like you used to do as a kid.

It’s more difficult to implement than I think most of us even realize.

More importantly, I don’t think many of us are even aware we’re doing this.

A few months ago, I heard Kyle Creek, aka “The Captain”, talk on a podcast about not using social media on Sundays. His theory behind this was that it would cause him to spend more time with his girlfriend and their infant son. To enjoy the finer things in life outside of his phone or TV screen. After listening to how it had helped him both mentally and emotionally, I decided to try it for myself.

The first few weeks, I would pick up my phone on a Sunday morning and my fingers would automatically swipe through the screen to check out my Instagram. I realized I did this out of habit without even thinking.

In order to break this habit I promised myself that I wouldn’t use social media on Sundays. Instead I’d find other media outlets to explore:

Facebook, YouTube, MLB app, Email, Pinterest (yes, dudes use Pinterest).

All fucking distractions. Distractions that I could use for instant gratification and ignore the reality that I was being a lazy pile of shit.

Every Sunday morning I would get a notification of my average daily screen time. Four hours per day was a good week for me. A minimum of four fucking hours per day, wasted on my phone! What the hell was I doing?!

There were things I could have been doing around the house. My fiancé would have loved to go for a drive somewhere and spent that time with me. Yet here I was, finding any technological distraction that I could to fill the void left by not using Instagram for the day.

The truth is, I have not yet given an all-out effort to this challenge. But the little effort I have given has brought me peace of mind. It has helped me to become more disciplined, but more importantly, helped me to realize that this is a fucking problem for myself and many others. A problem that will only get worse if I do not address it right away.

As I write this blog post, I am making a promise to myself to never use social media on a Sunday ever again. You are my witness.

Because the reality of the situation is that I’ve been wasting my life scrolling. I have been using my time to do “nothing”, when I could be investing that time into my relationship and to the betterment of myself. I’ve been sacrificing what time I have left on this planet to an app on a device that does nothing for my mental and emotional health.

Time is currency. It’s more valuable than any monetary or tangible thing that exists in this world. And there’s no way of knowing how much you have left.

You owe it to your significant other to be present.

You owe it to your children to be present.

You owe it to yourself to be present.

So together, let us stop using our Sundays to mindlessly lose ourselves in someone else’s highlight reels, and spend that time developing a life that we can be proud of.