There have been a few new shifts in my life this week– not necessarily regarding marriage things, but also not completely unrelated– that I thought I might discuss here.
First things first: my habits with technology need to change. As a kid in the 90s, my mother would have to set limits on my TV time, or else I would waste my weekends and summers in the living room staring blankly at episodes of Are You Afraid of the Dark?, The Jetsons, The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, or Beetlejuice that I had undoubtedly already seen. The same thing went for our Super Nintendo games. Mom made sure I got outside or worked on things with my hands instead of wasting my days in front of a screen. As a teen, I craved solitude a bit more and would retreat to my room to listen to music and work on projects. I used to write, draw, and read a lot on my own, and in the evenings I was typically in ballet class.
The nice thing about those days was that, even as a teenager trying to figure out who I was, I at least had some sort of identity. MySpace came out during my senior year, and I discovered it shortly after graduating. I spent A LOT of time watching other people’s lives through it. I’d work my shift or finish up a day at community college and would set up shop right when I got home in front of the family computer to “wind down” for the night. LiveJournal came into the mix somewhere in there too, amongst other, lesser-known social media sites. In early 2005, I stopped dancing to focus on school (even though I wasn’t really into my field of study). Life became work, school, and the internet.
Things got weird. Life was an endless rotation of those three things. Sometimes I’d socialize, and I met my husband that same year, so we would get out and do things, but who I was as a person got lost in the sauce. Once mobile social media apps became a thing (and YouTube… good lord, YouTube), I was rarely not looking at a screen. That has expanded into recent years. My screen time report typically shows 8-9 hour days. Much of that is during the workday, when I have YouTube videos playing sort of as “podcasts,” but that has its downsides too.
I’m never fully anywhere. And don’t mistake this for criticizing guilty pleasures– I’m all for them. This has become more than that. My attention is always split between what I’m doing in the “real world” and what content is coming from my cell phone or iPad. I noticed it this week when I had such a hard time focusing on some papers I had due (duh). Luckily, I came across this video (again, I’m not saying using these apps is a bad thing– I’ve learned so much, but I am also missing out on reality), where the creator talks about not allowing ourselves to get bored and really let thoughts enter our mind, which can sometimes be uncomfortable. He’s absolutely right, and it spoke to me.
After watching that video, I shut things down. No more Instagram, Facebook, or YouTube the rest of the day. And the following day, I knocked out a paper in 2-3 hours, even though I’d expected it to take a lot longer. I’ve also read probably 200 pages for pleasure in the last few days. As a slower reader, that’s pretty good for me.
It’s made me realize that I’ve spent a lot of the last 19 year chasing little dopamine hits. I guess, as humans, we all kind of are. But I’ve always said I feel like I don’t remember much of the last 20 years, and I think that’s a big part of it. I’m either missing out on things by spending my time online, or I’m distracted by content and only partially invested in what’s going on around me.
These dopamine hits extended beyond internet usage too. I had to admit it, but being involved in the FIRE movement sort of fed this…. well, fire. For me, it was updated our numbers every paycheck. I would get SO STOKED on paydays and type in new savings and investment balances on my little tracking spreadsheet. Again, this doesn’t seem that bad, but I think I skipped out on some life experiences for the sake of hitting savings goals for that little high. This has only occurred to me this week.
In rolling these realizations around in my head a bit, some other insights came of it. Those social media and financial dopamine hits were like a false remedy for things going on in life. I can trace this back to 2009 when my parents split. I knew that I was all of a sudden going to be responsible for my mother’s survival. Some of this responsibility may have been self-imposed, but we had no other family around, and my sister (4 years younger) didn’t have her life together at the time.
So I started climbing the corporate ladder to make more money, since I figured I’d be financially supporting her. She had been out of the workforce for years, did not want to get a corporate job (for complicated reasons), and was in poor health, even before her cancer diagnosis in 2015. I kept reaching for the next rung to “level up.” When she got sick, I felt the primary responsibility of her care on me. I kept climbing. She passed in 2018, and that year was incredibly busy for work. Lots of work trips occurred throughout the summer, and by Fall I was a newly-minted federal employee.
I had finally made it to the 6-figure club, but I knew the day of orientation that this was ultimately not the place for me. So, I started a small cleaning business on the side as a “backup.” I figured I could work this casually and then decide if I wanted to scale it to move out of the government job. What ended up happening was I created a lot of extra work for myself. Did it serve its purpose as an experiment to see if I was cut out for entrepreneurship? Sure. But it took me away from home a lot of weekends, usually after soul-crushing weeks at work.
I thought the attempted career break/shift in 2022 was going to be the answer to my happiness, and then my separation happened. I’ve had a lot of “aha” moments this past year, just not always the ones I was hoping for. This latest one has made me realize that chasing the next goal hasn’t always worked out in my favor. I’m ok admitting some failures (like the cleaning business or federal employment), but the personal failures are what’s getting to me.
I don’t really know what this will all mean in six months’ time. Maybe this experiment on limiting social media is just some other thing to chase, but I hope, if nothing else, I can root myself back into the real world more. I don’t want to find myself at 80 years old completely isolated because I put more effort into watching other people’s lives than cultivating my own relationships.
This latest pursuit, however, isn’t mired in metrics yet. The first month of my career break in April 2022 consisted of a social media break too (except for YouTube). I enjoyed it and didn’t miss social media (although, I felt like a I had more freedom to move around and do things outside… it’s not that I can’t now, but I’m in a city neighborhood that isn’t safe for going on walks, and safe hiking areas are much farther). I may just create content for my yoga journal account a couple days a week, and then limit consumption to 30 minutes a day, as a starting point.
Already, I’ve seen some positive changes in my school and work productivity, and I’m able to experience the things I love a little more fully. Plus, I hate the feeling of scrolling mindlessly. I have gained far less than I’ve lost in all of my time doing that.
I hope this will bring more clarity to life. That I’ll have more time to do the things I love. That I won’t view certain things as obstacles or threats. That I might just be a little bit happier.