Every Thought Isn't Content

Handle Your Platforms Responsibly

I have been pretty much off social media since my son was born last August. I jumped on a handful of times to share something important but, other than that, I stayed away. This isn’t boastful, just true. There are plenty of reasons for this decision, which you can read in my resignation letter to social media here.

Recently, after 10 months of almost no social media, I decided to give it a second chance. I was 30 seconds into scrolling when I thought, I hate it here.

People taking shots at each other every chance they get. Passive aggressive and unhealthy status updates. Selfies on selfies on selfies. Opinions that are neither helpful nor honest.

Sighing as I closed the app, I remembered one of the main ideas I had leading up to my social media resignation…not every thought needs to be public. This idea shocked me at the time. In the haze of my social media brain fog, I did not realize how often I would think something and immediately find a way to share it via status update, comment, or photo.

For the first few weeks after my departure from socials, I cannot tell you how many times a day I had to stop myself from opening an app and posting something just because I thought it. It was embarrassing to realize how deep that learned behavior had buried itself in my subconscious. As I began to notice that reflex kick in, I would ask myself: why do I want to share this? If I didn’t have a really good answer, I wouldn’t share it. Not sharing every thought or feeling I have? Revolutionary.

Instead of posting these thoughts, I started writing them down. And, can I be honest? Most of them were pretty awful. Not original. Not helpful. Not good. And certainly not worth sharing. I began to ask myself, as is my habit, a lot of hard questions…

Was I even capable of having a private thought? How many ideas or opinions had I shared that were underdeveloped? What good did I forfeit to a false sense of urgency? What damage did I do by sharing things that didn’t come from a healthy place?

I’ll share just one example out of many I saw on Facebook recently. I was tagged in a celebration post honoring a young man graduating 8th grade. The post itself was wonderfully written and I felt honored to be included in a short list of people who helped shape this student’s journey through middle school. However, as I went to leave a comment congratulating him and his parents, I came across someone attempting to warn this family away from their current church because of a bad experience they had. How was that an appropriate response on a post celebrating someone’s son graduating 8th grade? How did we get here?

The truth is most of our thoughts do not need to be shared publicly.

Social media has severely diminished our ability to differentiate between private and public thoughts. We’ve taken the term social media platform and made it just that—a platform for us to share everything we think or feel or believe in a moment without giving it a second thought. It has made us reactionary, defensive, and judgmental. Most of us weren’t designed for platforms and certainly not platforms that showcase every thought or opinion we have.

We need time to develop our thoughts, to change our minds. We need space to hear the full story and to process our feelings. Places to go that are private with people we trust to walk with us through hard times and through our hurt. We need accountability in our real life, not perceived via social media. And, when and if we have access to a platform, we need to handle it responsibly.

One thing we all know to be true is that humans cannot handle platforms without accountability. We cause too much damage. Social media has little-to-no accountability. It gives us a public platform for the most shallow, unhealthy, self-righteous version of ourselves and we end up resembling Schmidt’s “slam poetry” scene from 21 Jump Street…

Made by author on Canva

I don’t know if getting off of social media is the answer for you but each attempt I make to reenter that world, I am a little more convinced that it might be the answer for me. For now, I think I will use socials as a place to share my writing in longer form and work on showing up (when I decide to) in a healthy, accountable way.

---