Why I turned my back on social media.

When I first started my podcast back in 2020, I had begun to minimise social media in my own life and all I had was a Facebook personal account I used intermittently.

At that time, I was amazed about the minutiae of people’s personal lives they were visually documenting on social media and it wasn’t unusual for people to quip “next it will be people taking a photo of themselves having a c**p”. It was becoming a normalised way to keep up with the jones’ but also to demonstrate what amazing lives people led as social comparison took root.

In 2020 social media was the ‘go to’ method for anyone creating something online like the Guild of Dads podcast, and I am not ashamed to admit that I fell headfirst into the trap of doing what people said I ‘should’ do rather than what I necessarily wanted to do.

I remember someone in the mens space saying to me at the time – “just post to Instagram three times a day to spread your message and promote your podcast”.

My first love was podcasting, it’s what got me started on my self-improvement journey, and a medium I still love. Social media was something I felt I had to do. Mainly because everyone else was doing it and at the time I knew nothing different.

So here is what happened.

Initially I used social media to promote my podcast episodes on Facebook and Instagram but very quickly I realised that many in the men and dads’ space were posting additional content which may be relevant to their audience. They were also commenting on the content of others in the men and dads’ space, and associated communities on social media.

Which is the first lesson I learned creating posts for social media – as a creator you are also a consumer. Not only does your brain become attuned to the likes, comments and follows on your own account, the good old algorithm rewards you for getting involved with others stuff, with – you guessed it more likes and comments!! Like a lion you need to keep feeding daily with steak. The steak is your time spent on the platform. Obviously, this is very addictive, especially if you have the social media apps on your phone. Cue checking, scrolling, liking, checking back, refreshing.

By the time I arrived on social media organic reach had all but died. The second lesson I learned was that Meta was now a pay to play model, so only a fraction of people would see what you posted unless you paid Mark Zuckerberg. Which meant that content was increasingly becoming more outrageous, contrarian and provocative to even to get seen, let alone circulated to your followers. Hence the birth of stuff like rage bait and click bait, which feeds beautifully off what is already a pretty addictive medium. I’ve recently heard said of social media that if something is free YOU are the product. Given how users data is sold to advertisers and used by Meta themselves this is 100% accurate.

Facebook groups were still something that was thriving at that time and this is where I decided to build the Guild of Dads Facebook group, growing to over thousand members at one point which sounds impressive. My third lesson was that Facebook groups take up a lot of time, you are constantly administrating infighting and arguments, and Facebook community standards mean your group can be shut down at any time, for no apparent reason.

Which feeds into my next point – algorithms. Instagram was probably the worst, introducing an ever-increasing amount of stuff you needed to use on the platform in order for your content to be seen. Which means keeping ahead of it becomes a full time job. F**k that!! This fourth lesson is why I moved from spending so much time on Instagram to trying out Twitter.

Twitter (X) was a platform that I enjoyed initially because it was not so video centric as the others and being honest, I linked up with some cool people and academics on there who really do know their stuff. But my fifth lesson courtesy of Twitter was that there was a whole eco system of users on the platform that recycled top performing tweets and manipulated engagement and visibility by leveraging engagement pods. Not to mention the increasing amounts of anon accounts in the men and dads’ space that spouted absolute nonsense, especially on relationship stuff. Many on Twitter seemed to boast of having built six figure businesses – completely unverifiable of course. If you want to go online and waste valuable time in your day arguing with people, Twitter (X) is the place to get your fix.

I was increasingly wasting a vast amount of time on social media, and it was becoming a barrier to connecting with my wife and kids. The juice wasn’t worth the squeeze anymore.

We are all hypocrites in one way shape or form. If we weren’t we would all be exemplars of perfection, but in the men and dads space on social media I could see that a lot of the men extolling the virtues of being present with those around them, were the ones hopelessly addicted to the runaway dopamine train that was social media. Worst still for manfluencers it was bringing out the worst in them instead of the best.

I’d have conversations with guys in private, one such guy having a Facebook Group with over 50,000 members telling me “to be honest some days I want to shut it all down and walk away from it, social media is such a pain in the ass”.

The event which prompted me to ditch it completely was a relative going through health problems and it was at that time I simply wanted to cut out anything unnecessary from my life that didn’t add any value, get back to basics and be more present and connected.

So social media was kicked to the kerb……….and I’ve not looked back since.

I’ve also stumbled upon a few influences in the past year or so that have solidified my thinking around social media, and just tech in general.

The first is Cal Newport – author of Deep Work and Digital Minimalism. I’d read Deep Work some years ago, but Digital Minimalism has really solidified my belief that tech isn’t really the enemy, but more how you use it for the things you value in life. The premise of his thirty-day digital detox is brilliant, but the book really delves into just how ubiquitous and pervasive social media has become in allowing the attention economy to hijack all our lives. A great read or listen.

The other two influences (unsurprisingly) are The Minimalists and Greg McKeown. The former advocating living a more meaningful life with less, the latter extolling the virtues of Essentialism.

What I really like about The Minimalists depending on how far you take their methods is that it applies brilliantly to the lives of dads. Many of us are drowning in complicated lives, full to the brim with obligations, noise, information and simply ‘stuff’ so getting more aware about how we can remove some of this stuff and live more meaningfully, can massively increase our bandwidth for more valuable things.

Greg McKeown’s Essentialism is an approach to achieving more by doing less by focusing only on what is truly important, eliminating the nonessential, and creating space for meaningful work and rest. Again, super relevant for dads as it teaches you to be deliberate, set boundaries and pursue few things that matter the most.

I fully get that kicking social media to the kerb is not everyone’s cup of tea in the same way as not everyone likes marmite (I do) but one thing I have learned in recent years is to look very closely at what adds value to your life, and in the case of stuff that doesn’t, consider minimising or eliminating it altogether. Don’t be scared to do so just because everyone else is still doing it.

Food for thought!

Have you reached a point where you have had enough of social media? Maybe you’ve been reducing it or removed it from your life already. Or conversely maybe you would never ditch social media.

Let me know your experience in the comments below, I’d love to hear what you think.