30 Days Without Social Media

Five: The number of tweets I post per hour. Five million: The number of times my thumb slides to refresh Twitter on my iPhone everyday. Okay, fine, that’s an exaggeration.

But to give you an idea of the amount of content I consume everyday through social networks: I currently follow 1,061 people on Twitter and 727 on Instagram. I’m not much of a Facebook user, but as I speak, I have 1,531 friends. I suppose that isn’t even a lot yet, but can you already imagine how many types of food I see everyday?

It’s not that I don’t wanna know what you’re eating – okay, fine, most of the time I don’t – but other than that, during the time I was staring at your Pasta Extraordinaire Foodpornialloni, I could have been doing something else.

For everything that we do, there is something that we are not doing. And I have always wondered what it is that I could have been doing during those hours that I spend everyday, tweeting useless information, deciding which Instagram filter to use on my photos, refreshing my feeds.

It is for this reason (among many, many, many others) that I am locking myself out of social media for thirty days. As of this moment, I have been outside of the tweep loop for roughly 38.5 hours. I feel like a vegetarian. You will still see me though – my blog posts are auto-tweeted and posted on Facebook – but consumption, unless absolutely necessary or required by my job, is down to zero.

If you ever want to talk to me, I have a comments section down here. Otherwise, here’s my e-mail address: vidasioson(at)gmail.com.

P.S. This effort was inspired by Steve Corona, CTO at Twitpic. He wrote about how his effort changed his life here.