Animated Talks!: 40-Days of No Social Media

Hey Animated World!

Happy Easter! I know I’m late on this, but I haven’t been able to be on the blog or Twitter lately due to finals. So I didn’t want to go without saying it! I hope you enjoyed a very great and happy Easter! I’m in finals for another week but thank you for your patience regarding tweets and posts! With that, I finally have some time away from studies to talk a bit!

For this post, I’m going to backtrack to about 40 Days or so ago from last week. I decided at the beginning of the Season of Lent to abstain from all my personal social media accounts. Mainly Facebook, Instagram, and (the tough one) Snapchat. I rarely check my personal Twitter account so that outlet of social media wasn’t really an issue. I did not abstain from any of animated’s accounts because I thought 40-Days of inactivity would have been too much, as well as counter intuitive to my goals set for the blog this year.

I’ll admit, the first couple days were a little bit tough. Mainly due to the natural instinct of, for example, being in a waiting room and naturally finding yourself wandering on your phone. Or like those 5 minutes before class ends. I wanted to keep my word though of abstaining from personal social media accounts, so I deleted the apps from my laptop and turned off notifications on my phone. I also put all said apps in a folder intelligently naming it “NO”. 🙂

After turning off notifications, it became a lot easier to not be tempted to check any accounts. Over the course of the 40-Days I found my outlook on social media changed quite a bit. Here are a few things I noticed during my time away from my personal social media accounts.

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• Time Management Improvement.

I think this is what most people expect will happen when you abstain from social media for a period of time. Yes, my time management improved, but also went into other different things. For example, the 10 minutes I would usually spend checking Instagram before class went toward being active on animated’s Twitter account. The 30 minutes before knocking out for sleep I’d spend scrolling through Facebook went to reading a new book I bought about Attraction. The 15 minutes I take between studying subjects went to watching a Markiplier YouTube video to ease my mind from the stress. Yes, your time management improves a little. I’m starting to read a lot more. However, the time you save won’t ALWAYS go into something like school or reading. I feel a lot of people think this way. I noticed I was being more productive in other areas such as being more active on animated’s Twitter account. Sure it’s still social media, but it helped me focus a little more on the blog and the community.

• Social Media is Great for Preserving Memories.

This was something I definitely took for granted about, for example, random Snapchats. With all the negativity associated with social media, it does have its pros. I talked in a few posts ago about my trip to Disney World during spring break. This was during my time of no personal social media. I have a lot of funny memories from previous Disney trips mainly because of Snapchat. I have a picture of a friend and I stuck on Space Mountain because…. well I mean there really isn’t anything better to do when stuck on a ride.. plus the lights were on so you could see the entire track. These small little random moments are some of my favorites to look back on when looking through pictures on my phone. I didn’t realize this till a few days ago scrolling through past Disney trip pictures, I didn’t have any pictures from my spring break trip. I’m kind of sad because it was one of my favorite trips, but I was able to get two pictures from the friend I went with. Not all was lost. It makes you realize, not all of social media is toxic. It can be used for some great memory making. Don’t take for granted those random snaps!

• When Hanging Out, People are Genuinely Curious and Want to be Around You.

Lastly this one was the biggest shocker, but probably the most obvious. When you’re writing or sharing on personal social media accounts, people have a very elementary way of “hanging out with you”. I’ll try to better explain what I mean when I say this throughout this section. If you’re thinking for example, hey I wonder what animated has been up to, chances are you’d check my Twitter account because that’s where I’m most active. You could read a couple of my most recent tweets/retweets and have a sense of what I’ve been up to. When that outlet is suddenly turned off, it leads people (mostly friends) to become curious. I found that when I went out to hangout with friends on weekends, they genuinely wanted to hang out and ask about what I’ve been up to. I’m not saying before they didn’t want to hang out with me. That’s far from what I’m trying to say. I’m saying, because you don’t have that almost constant interaction with people, it makes those normally usual hangouts mean a lot more. Both to the people you’re hanging around and yourself. Because I was off of social media, I was also curious to know how my friends were. It makes for that time spent together have a lot more meaning. You don’t have that social media buffer between times hanging out to constant keep in contact. I found it a neat little discovery, but also a pretty obvious one. If you’re not in constant contact with someone, you’re going to value that time spent with them more when a opportunity for contact arises.

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Overall, abstaining from social media was a really neat experience/experiment. It made me more aware of how social media can be both a pro and a con. I’m also proud to say I made it all 40-Days with only one cheat! ( I had go on Facebook one night to accept a friend request because I was going to feel like crap making someone wait 30+ Days to respond XD). Even though the 40-days of Lent are over, I still have notifications to my personal accounts turned off on my phone. Plus, I still haven’t installed my apps back onto my laptop. I’m not really in a huge rush to get back into using social media periodically. I’m happy I took abstaining seriously this year because I feel like I definitely benefited from the last 40-Days!

That’s all for this sketch! 😀

Again, hope you enjoyed a wonderful Easter!

-Animated