The Life-Saving Magic of Digital Minimalism.

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who have social media and those who have never had social media.

Those in the first category have invested their life and time into social media because they believe that it’s entertaining and fundamental for professional growth and networking opportunities. They have bought into the idea that no one can build a name for themselves without growing an attentive and dedicated audience online who invest in their life and what they stand for.

Then you have those in the second category who believe social media is a brainwashing, life-sucking, privacy-violating machine which wants to suck up all your data with no personal benefit to you. They regard those on social media as naïve, thoughtless and time-wasting fools who have sold their souls to a demonic, brain-deadening and exploitative industry in the fruitless pursuit of popularity, notoriety and, potentially, fame.

I fall into the middle of these two camps. I spent years of my life trying to build up an audience in the hopes I would build an impressively employable, professional portfolio. But after twelve years, I finally gave up, concluded that I was wasting my time on something that brought me misery and quit social media for good.

What is Digital Minimalism?

Digital minimalism, like minimalism, is all about reducing the noise and clutter in your life. People understand decluttering in terms of Marie Kondo: getting rid of items which no longer ‘spark joy’ to help increase the physical and, thus, mental space you have in your life.

Digital decluttering is the same, but it’s not all about phone storage space. It’s about emotional and attentional decluttering.

Attentional decluttering examines where we exert our energy and evaluates whether our time and efforts are being spent effectively and efficiently.
Emotional decluttering is when we reflect upon our daily emotional states in different contexts (work, relational, leisure, etc.) and analyse which parts of our lives create positive and beneficial emotional responses and which aren’t.

I finally realised this year that I was allowing social media to impact my life negatively.

I used social media in a self-sabotaging, incongruent and disempowering way.

I wasted far too much of my life trying to be inspirational online. I spent hours, in fact, probably months of my life scrolling through feeds online, ogling at these seemingly flawless, successful, inspirational millionaires wondering how they became so wonderful and achieved so much in life.

I wanted to help other people in life, too; I wanted to be inspirational and thought-provoking. I wanted to make people feel how the people I followed online made me feel.

It took me far too long to realise that the people I followed online made me feel awful about myself. I wasn’t trying to be inspirational for other people; I just wanted to be seen as significant, like everyone else.

The Ego Behind “Being Inspirational”

My pursuit of inspiring and motivating others was nothing but a shallow pursuit for self-validation. What’s worse, the price I paid was my privacy and sense of self.

Online, I was bullied, judged and cruelly critiqued (as anyone open about themselves online is); some of my followers contacted my employers and sent in false complaints about me. I even had stalkers find out my home address and send things to me. People felt entitled to all the intimate details of my life, from my finances to my mental and physical health and relationship status.

Of course, they felt entitled to those things: I’d been giving myself away online to them for years.

The emotional and personal price we pay for being on social media is huge; we sell our details, our data, our emotions, our relationships, our body image, our statuses, our thoughts, our grievances, our losses.

Just as I realised that I’d been a corporate tool through the consumerist industry my whole life, I realised what role I had played in my unhappiness and dissatisfaction.

This isn’t the first time I quit social media; I had a successful three-month stint at the end of 2017. However, as of January 2018, I was hired as a social media manager, meaning that I had to log into a load of my old accounts and… well, for some unknown reason, after leaving that job (which I hated), I continued to use social media out of habit, despite hating everything about it.

Is it Social Media’s Fault?

Am I blaming social media for my misery? Of course not. It’s not social media’s fault I felt the way I did all these years: my feelings and outcomes are entirely my responsibility.

Online platforms offer a unique and rare opportunity to showcase oneself, connect with a worldwide audience and have one’s voice heard. Social media can be an enlightening, inspirational, fun and beneficial thing if used in the right way by the right people.

But I’m not the right person, and I do not use it correctly.

Social Media isn’t for Everyone

Social media is marketed as this ‘one-size fits all’ entertainment platform when, in reality, there’s no such thing.

Not everyone enjoys reading books or watching movies; some people can’t stand music concerts, whilst others will happily live weeks in a muddy festival field peeing into a bottle and washing with wet wipes.

I’ve met tens of people who became successful in life without social media to leverage themselves off of; they’ve managed to keep in contact with distant relatives and friends without Facebook Messenger; they’ve built businesses without needing a large social media following and Instagrammable backdrop, and they’ve been inspired and motivated without spending two hours a day scrolling through Instagram.

How I Went Digitally Minimalist

I locked myself out of all my accounts and deleted all the apps I’ll no longer use (including all those ridiculous photo editing apps).
I deleted all the phone numbers of people I have no meaningful connection with or who don’t bring me joy.
I unsubscribed from many email newsletters I habitually just archived or deleted.
I also blocked certain websites from my browsers, including my phone.

Now, my phone is just used for calls, texts, weather forecasts, audiobooks, podcasts and a dictionary. I don’t have hundreds of unread messages and comments to reply to, and I have nothing to check first thing in the morning except the weather forecast.

Nobody knows how I’m feeling today, what I’m doing or where I’m going. If I want to know how my friends are doing, I must ask them rather than look at their feed and vice versa. Nobody knows what projects I’m up to, and anyone who reads my articles online didn’t find it because of a link I shared excessively on a social media platform.

Digital minimalism not only changed my life, but it also saved it.

It removed all the distractions, stressors and bustles which were deafening me. It allowed me to live a life where the only person I was performing for was myself. It gave me back my privacy and a sense of oneness.
I stopped comparing, berating and belittling myself; I stopped trying to keep up in a race I couldn’t win and shouldn’t have even been running.

Disconnecting myself from the online world felt like the final scene of Jumanji; all the deadly wild animals, flash floods, lightning and gun hunters got sucked into a tiny little box on my computer desk. With a click of a mouse, my life shrunk down from this noisy, expansive, infinite space to my silent, tiny living room.

Have I missed my chances of becoming a successful, famous, influential writer and speaker? Maybe.
Have I changed my life for the better? Most definitely.