Reflections on a six week hiatus

[megpie71]

I took a social media hiatus from about the end of May to the first week of July. It was for a practical reason, rather than an ideological one - I'm autistic, and I was having a few changes happening in my life at that time. The changes were largely good changes, but eustress is still stress, and my brain has a strictly limited capacity to deal with extra stressors. Dropping social media was a way to reduce a couple of stressors, so I chose to do that while I adjusted to my new normal.

I took my first look at my socials in six weeks yesterday. Now, I'm not a huge social media user to begin with - I never got interested in Facebook, because what Facebook was offering wasn't what I was interested in; Twitter was always entirely too similar to being trapped in the middle of a very noisy room with thousands of people talking at once; I'm not a visual thinker, so Instagram doesn't interest me very much; and Reddit, while it does seem to bring back some of the "good old days" vibe of Usenet, also brings with it all the "bad old days" memories of Usenet too. So mostly I stick on Dreamwidth and Tumblr. I know, right?

So what's the hiatus been like? Well, it's meant I've had to find other ways of filling up spare time rather than just flipping over to Tumblr and endlessly scrolling. So I've been doing a lot more gaming (mostly on Final Fantasy XIV) and reading a lot more news than I used to - particularly local news through the ABC. I've been re-reading fanfic, and doing a fair chunk of wiki-walking through RationalWiki (which is about as close as I really want to get to dealing with a lot of the more extreme people and movements described on there). My reading has broadened out, in a way, and my days are a lot less about sitting at the computer scrolling through Tumblr. Which, on balance, is probably a good thing.

Do I plan to head back to my previous levels of social media usage? Probably not, to be honest. At present I have a plan to limit myself to a maximum of an hour a day on Tumblr, simply because I don't need the drama.

Comments

[jajalala]

This sounds fantastic! I feel like so many of my hours get sucked away on tumblr... recently I realized that I have my most creative thoughts in the shower most likely because I never let myself get bored otherwise, and the shower is the one place where I can't just think for 2 seconds on whatever problem/project I'm working on and then be like "uugh it's kinda difficult to think this through" and then swap to a social media tab like "ooh I'll just chillax on here for a lil bit..."

A limit is really smart. This is making me reflect and consider if I should take a social media break as well... it sounds very freeing and a great way to catch up on reading and other activities!