Let's Opt Out of Social Media Together

A summer not-a-book club

At the end of 2021, I began a four month sabbatical. I’ve not written much about the sabbatical here on Sayable. At the end of it, it almost felt too precious to me to hand out reflections on it on a silver platter. I wanted the work it had done in me to continue doing work in me, and the best way I could do that, was to continue to let it marinate in me, mostly unseen by others.

There was one aspect of it, though, that couldn’t help but be seen by others, and that was the clear before and after of my social media presence.

If you’re a writer who has had any experience trying to get published since about 2010 or so, you know the dreaded word platform. Either you don’t have enough of it or, if you do have what is considered enough, it still never feels like enough for what the publishing industry seems to need/want. In fact, there is no “enough,” there is only “never enough.”¹

During my sabbatical, including my break from social media, something broke in me. Actually, something broken in me broke. I came back to social media with an indifference I didn’t have before and didn’t know was possible. I simply did not feel the sense of not-enough-ness toward it that I’d had before the sabbatical.

I know a lot of other writers, makers, and creators who struggle with the outsized place social media takes up in our work. We want to concentrate on the work, but we also want the work to matter to other people, we want their eyeballs, their attention, their hearts. We desire meaning. And it feels like this constantly rocking seesaw, ricocheting us between deep and quiet work, and shallow and public work. We take breaks, yeah, but we always come back and it often feels worse when we do.

I wonder if one of the reasons we find it so easy to return to old habits when we return to SM is because we took the break alone and often without doing some deep inner work while we were on break? We white-knuckle our way through our 30-40 days, waiting for the day we can get back online.

What if, I’m asking myself, we could do a communal quit?

What if for three months, we as a Sayable community, deleted the apps, gave our attention to some questions to work through, did something else with our itchy fingers, and expansive minds? What if we really got into the nitty gritty of our own lives and attachments to social media? What if we crafted a plan for how we’d use social media and we did it together?

I love that idea. And when I floated the question by you here on Sayable and across my own social media, a bunch of you said, “Me too.”

So that’s what we’re going to do.

The point of this isn’t to not grow as writers/creators/makers, we’re just going to try to avoid the most vacuous aspects of social media or the truncated forms that tip toward the algorithm/virality/addiction.

We’re going to try to leave behind the most terrible habits we have on social media—scrolling endlessly in small moments of time, checking first thing in the morning, feeling an urgency to post more or better, engage more, etc.. We’ll try to create some space between those habits and your true and beloved self. So if you’re really online, maybe cold turkey is what you need. If you think you’re relatively healthy about it, maybe you just need to restrict it to certain times or zones in your house, or one particular app for one particular job. You’re the boss of you.

• Maybe you work for a publishing company or your kids have activities where the info goes out on FB or you’re a personal assistant for someone, you can’t just delete it all. Consider deleting your personal social media or only using social media in a designated spot in your house or only on your laptop, etc. Use your discernment. Consider moving important conversations taking place only on social media to another medium, just for a few months.

• If you are a writer, stay on the medium on which you write long form only (Instagram captions don’t count, sorry.), just as a potter would stay at their wheel, and a photographer would stay with their camera and editing software. (If that's Substack, delete the app on your phone and try not to do Notes, but continue to write and share your work there. If it’s Scrivener, do your work there.)

We're working to reject the algorithms and virility, not the work.

Apart from Notes, I am not making Substack a part of this for a few reasons.

• I will be sending out the weekly emails (reflections/Zoom links, etc.) through Substack

• The discussion forum will be taking place on Substack

• One aim is for you to WRITE more longform and make more art! Not less. So keep on writing and sending out your Substacks or blogs, but try really hard to take a break from growth tactics such as posting notes, upped engagement, etc.

Before we go any further, you will need to be a paid subscriber of Sayable to join. These Book Clubs (and this not-a-book club) take a lot of work for me to put together and run, and I think a small buy-in from participants is appropriate to ask for. You can even just sign up for the three months ($7 x 3 = $21) and then cancel, I don’t mind.

The experiment will run from June 1-September 1.

Each month we’ll give attention to a different aspect of this work. The order is important because before we can do outer work, we’ve got to do inner work.

• June will be personal formation/deformation

• July will be communal/connection

• August will be professional/platform

Your commitment to yourself:

• You will need to log out of/delete social media apps (use your own discernment for how that looks for you). (Weekly time: 0)

• You'll do your best to engage the personal reflection questions each week (Weekly time: 1 hour)

• You'll commit to doing some kind of creative work offline this summer. I'm not assigning it and you don't have to show it to anyone. This is just you telling yourself that you're going to move the needle an inch forward on a bit of work you care about. Your memoir, some poetry, a novel, a painting, a knitted sweater, some landscaping—you choose. (Weekly time: unlimited!)

Your commitment to the community:

• You'll engage the discussion question I post at the end of each week’s email on Sayable and respond to at least two other participants on the discussion area (Weekly time: 10 minutes)

• You’ll try to make at least two of the four one-hour Zoom calls we do together every 30ish days. (Monthly time: 1 hour)

• Bonus: If you select the additional option on the registration form to participate in a smaller group discussion with a few of your fellow quitters, you’ll do your best to show up in whatever capacity you’re able (WhatsApp, Marco-polo, Vox, Zoom—whatever medium your group decides works best for all of you). (Weekly time: your choice)

My commitment to you:

• I will delete the apps and do the work alongside you!

• On Sundays, May 25-August 31, I'll send out a weekly email with questions for reflection and discussion on whichever aspect we're thinking about that week.

• My first email will contain helpful hints for making this work for you, as well as prompt cards to help with the itchy hands you might have the first few weeks.

• I will engage in the discussion questions on the Sayable discussion space.

• I will host one first week informational Zoom call and three end of the month Zoom calls where we discuss what we've learned in the previous four weeks (four calls total, each ~30 days apart).

I will send the first email on May 25th. You can join anytime before then and I hope you will. It will be like summer camp for our souls!

The link to register is just below the paywall. Cannot wait to do this with you!