Why I'm breaking up with social media
It's a new year and I'm changing my relationship status
Listen to me read the post…
In early December, I decided to take a break from social media. For a few years now, I’ve had a deal with myself that a) I won’t go on social media on the weekends, and b) whenever I notice that my behaviour is becoming addictive or my contentment and self-worth are taking a nose-dive, I’ll take a break. Multiple times a year, I take a week, two weeks, or even a month off.
After about a week, I noticed how peaceful it felt to be away. I was grounded, content, and in a more ease-filled relationship with myself. I started wondering whether there was any reason to go back. Slightly tongue-in-cheek, I wrote a list of reasons why I wanted to break up, imagining social media to be a shitty boyfriend…
Why I’m breaking up with social media
(In which social media is a shitty boyfriend)
He’s always trying to sell me stuff I don’t need.
He prioritizes his business connections over my genuine friendships.
He started out fun and supportive and then became manipulative and controlling.
He keeps changing the rules of engagement and it makes me feel like I have to play games to get attention.
He benefits from my nervous system being activated, so he never helps soothe it.
He drags me back into unhealthy relationship patterns like people-pleasing and codependency.
His insatiable appetite for content makes me frenetic.
He makes money off my hard work and tosses me crumbs now and then.
He coerces me into staring at a screen when I know I’m better off wandering among the trees or curled up with a book.
I have better conversations without him around.
He attaches my worthiness to whether or not people think I’m interesting.
I feel better about myself and what I create when he’s not looking over my shoulder.
The list brought sudden clarity that I’d avoided seeing before. If I’m in a relationship with social media, then it’s an abusive one. For years now, I’ve been bargaining with myself to create boundaries that would allow me to stay in the relationship in the way that did the least harm to me. (As early as 2013, I wrote a social media manifesto, trying to be intentional about how I showed up.) But the “least harm” is still harm and accepting it as a “necessary evil” has been doing damage to my soul.
The Necessary Evil
There’s a unique and sometimes hard to explain (even to myself) complexity that comes when a) you’ve built a livelihood that is rooted, at least in part, in sharing yourself and your personal stories, b) your income is tied to how visible your work is online, and c) social media algorithms make it increasingly difficult for your work to be visible on a consistent basis. Even if you’ve worked hard to grow a healthy sense of self, it becomes almost impossible to separate your personal worth from your visibility and income. It sometimes feels like I have to split myself in two – doing my best to maintain my self-love and live a grounded life while sending the avatar of myself into potentially dangerous spaces for the good of the work.
I’ve taken several steps to mitigate the harm of this complexity, including the development of the Centre as a way to create some healthy separation between myself and the body of work that is at the heart of what I teach, but I couldn’t find a way to fully extricate myself from social media without risking everything I’ve built. While social media platforms have definitely made my work more visible (and I am grateful for the people they’ve brought into my circles), they have also added considerable complexity to how I do my work and how much energy I have to put into being available to people. Social media creates expectations around parasocial relationships and turns people into products in this attention economy.
It’s been truly disheartening, these past few years, to try to put out work that is about freeing us from systems of harm and reconnecting with our humanity while being so enmeshed with systems that have become harmful and dehumanizing.
Last year it felt especially onerous. We hired a marketing company to try to stem the tide of our shrinking numbers post-pandemic, and they insisted that, in order to be more visible, we had to put out daily content on multiple platforms. It was a truly frenetic time that made me feel anxious, unstable, and disconnected from myself. After pushing back repeatedly, I finally realized that the only way I could create the volumes of content they were asking for, while maintaining my sanity, was to unplug from the system demanding that content and run away to the woods. I rented a tiny off-grid cabin by a lake, got quiet enough to tap into the source of my creativity for a few days, and let the words flow onto the page.
Ironically, when all of that additional content landed back on the platforms I’d unplugged from, there was ZERO return on investment. Not a single metric – not social media engagement, not course registration, and not income - went up even a little bit. I felt like I’d had to cut off pieces of myself to feed the hungry beast and the beast just laughed and asked for more.
It’s been this way for years. I have created a LOT of content that I’ve given away for free online (hoping it would bring people to my paid offerings), and, in the early years, the biggest concern was how much of it was being plagiarized or not attributed to me. I used to periodically plug a paragraph from my viral blog post into a search engine, and quickly find a dozen or more people pretending they’d written those words, and far more who gave no attribution. Some of them were making money from my words, which seemed especially egregious considering the pain out of which those words were born (in the wake of my mom’s death). There was little recourse, unless I was willing to pay heaps of money in legal fees, so I learned to ignore it as the price of being a writer in online spaces.
Recently, more concerning than the plagiarism is how much my free content is being used to train AI engines. If you were to ask ChatGPT to write a book in the style of Heather Plett, it would likely do a convincing job of it, given how much access it has to my written words. The cynic in me wonders whether the strategy of social media platforms has always been to trick people into sharing lots of free content online, and then become anesthetized to having that content stolen, in order to feed the AI engines so that they can eventually do everything without human content creators. We, as content creators, have been little more than indentured labourers who never got what we were promised when we agreed to work for free.
Stuck in another Codependent Relationship
Back in 2015, I ended an unhealthy marriage, and it was only later that I realized how codependent I’d been in the relationship. Despite repeated efforts not to, I’d allowed myself to become overly enmeshed with the emotional well-being of a person whose unstable mental health sometimes resulted in abusive behaviour. For years I’d told myself stories to excuse the harm this was causing me. As I wrote in my second book, I found dozens of reasons to stay, not least of which was the well-being of my children. The courage to leave came only when I realized that what would benefit my children far more than an emotionally unstable two-parent household was at least one parent who was doing her best to be stable, well-resourced, well-boundaried, and free of enmeshment. To look after my children and create a safe home for them (and for me), I had to look after myself.
A few weeks ago, when I made the list of reasons to break up with social media, it felt like déjà vu - I had much the same realization. I was in a codependent relationship with social media just as I’d been with my former husband, and I was sacrificing myself for no valuable purpose (not even my bottom line). It was self-delusion, a lopsided sense of what I was responsible for, and stubborn optimism that convinced me to stay.
It’s an age-old story - the protagonist keeps convincing herself that the good outweighs the bad, that things will eventually get better, and that she’s invested too much to abandon the relationship completely. Eventually, though, the blinders come off and she sees the folly of her ways - she admits to herself that the suffering won’t go away and that it’s not doing anyone any good.
Just as I realized for my children, I recognize now that what is most valuable for my work, for the people who come to my work, and especially for myself, is for me to be strong, grounded, well-resourced, and free of enmeshment. If my work is about helping people be healthier, I can’t do that by continually putting myself in harm’s way. If my work is about liberation, I can’t do that if I’m a willing participant in systems that cause harm.
Knowing who I am
Just before I decided to take a social media break, my friend Aimée shared the following story on Instagram:
When I was in my early 20s an elder told a story in ceremony that I think about all the time.
She shared about a time when someone tried to project their anger and shame onto her by telling her awful things about herself.
She said she listened to him until he was done, and then stood up and said, “Is that all?" He said "Yes." She looked at him, said "I know who I am," and walked away.
The story landed like rain on parched land. Just before that, I’d gone through a rocky period on social media, and my sense of self was feeling shaken once again. As I wrote in an earlier post, holding space was having another viral moment and I tried to make a meaningful contribution, imagining myself to be an elder offering guidance to those new to the practice, but my contribution was largely ignored. Just after I posted that, a person who knows little about me or about how much work I’ve poured into deepening the practice of holding space chose to write an unkind public post, linking my actions to capitalist greed and accusing me of claiming ownership of the term and monopolizing on a viral moment. It rocked me, but at the same time, it didn’t feel unfamiliar. Especially as a woman, when you take up space online and claim any expertise, someone is bound to tear you down. Sadly, it’s often other women who do so.
The ugliest parts of our culture are amplified on social media. When we’re left feeling powerless within systems that dehumanize us, we often project our pain onto each other instead of calling out the much more powerful sources of harm.
When I read Aimée’s story, I had sudden clarity about what I am no longer willing to do. I will not willingly show up in spaces where I have to prove my worth or justify my existence. I will not sell my soul in order to be seen. I will not subject myself to abuse in order to eek out a meagre living. And I will not stoop to the kind of lateral unkindness that threatens to cancel people in order to compete for the tiny crumbs we get tossed by tech giants. If this is the cost I’m required to pay, then I will find another way to make a living.
I know who I am. And I have the agency to walk away.
Becoming a Grounded Guide
The final piece of clarity that helped me make the decision to part ways with social media came in the work I’ve been doing while offline this past month. I’ve been building our new program, Leadership for Liminal Spaces. Krista and I have been feeling the call to take our work to the next level, to create an offering that speaks to the great need we see in the world – a need for leaders who are wise, strong, humble, and grounded, leaders who will make wise choices even in the face of oppression; leaders who are dedicated to The Great Turning, even when it feels like an impossibility.
Our greatest desire is to support people who are doing their best to be Grounded Guides – leaders with high emotional intelligence, agility, adaptability, stability, values, and courage.
As I was working on it, clarifying what it means to be a Grounded Guide, it became exceedingly clear that I need to first do my very best to be a Grounded Guide myself. I cannot be a Grounded Guide if I have to continually put myself into spaces that don’t make me feel grounded - spaces that dehumanize me, take away my power and leave me depleted.
In other words, I can’t make my best offering in this program (or others) if I’m still cutting off pieces of myself to feed the hungry beast of social media.
I need to be whole. I need to know who I am. I need to walk away from what causes harm so that my strength is not depleted.
I know who I am, and I know where I stand.
Opening a New Door
It’s taken a few weeks to write this post - longer than most posts take because I wanted to be clear about the choice I’m making and my reasons for making it. I thought I was done and ready to post it, but then last night, on New Year’s Eve, on my way back to this lovely island I now call home, it occurred to me that something was missing.
I’ve written about the door I’m choosing to close in this post, but I didn’t want to leave it on that note. Instead, I want to end with the hope of a new door opening. In my experience, whenever I make a hard choice to walk away from something that once felt impossible to live without - a relationship, a job, a city or a house - it creates space for something new in my life. That’s where I want to end this post - with hope and anticipation for what is to yet to be revealed.
I don’t know exactly what that will look like, but I’m going to start the new year with an open heart and open mind, ready to welcome what is to come. For starters, I plan to increase my time in the woods and by the sea, and I’m going to prioritize embodied connection with people who matter to me. I’m also going to start putting words onto the page for the new book that’s taking shape in my mind. And I’ll be working with Krista on Leadership for Liminal Spaces, as well as other projects that emerge.
Beyond my individual hope for a new door, I have hope that, collectively, we’ll find new doors to open. Perhaps we’ll realize that the emperor has no clothes, and we’ll find healthier and more human alternatives for social media. Perhaps we’ll “go analogue” and engage in more meaningful connections away from our computers and out of reach of AI. Perhaps we’ll go outside and “touch grass” together and be reminded that we matter to the ecosystem of our planet even when we feel like we don’t matter to the corporations that make money from us being online.
And… who knows what else? I look forward to finding out!
What does this look like practically and where can you find my work? I will still be online, trying to carve out a healthy way to show up and offer meaningful things into the world, but it will be with stronger boundaries, clearer intention and a renewed commitment to slow media. I’ll share my writing regularly on Substack (perhaps with more of it behind a paywall), and Krista and I plan to upload regular YouTube videos where we’ll chat about themes related to Leadership for Liminal Spaces. When the time is right, we hope to launch season two of our podcast.
As for Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, BlueSky and TikTok, I’ll be removing myself from those platforms. For now, until we decide it’s not worth the effort, we’ll still maintain our Centre for Holding Space accounts as a way of notifying people of upcoming initiatives.
We’ll also be developing ways of gathering our community for conversations away from social media. We have a community call planned for January 12th, which you should have received notification for if you’re a paid subscriber on Substack or an alumni of our programs. (You can become a paid subscriber at any time to have access to those spaces.) We’re also very excited about gathering our community at our Alumni Gathering in September. (Those who join us for Leadership for Liminal Spaces will be eligible to attend the gathering.)
I loved reading this, Heather. Your clarity is a light shining out for all of us who are struggling with the monster that social media has become. I’m not quite ready to leave it altogether (mostly for personal connection reasons but also there is FOMO and a fear of being forgotten - neither of which I’m proud of) but I did recently make a very difficult decision that allowed me to take substantial time away for the first time in years. I’m reading books like Stolen Focus and Digital Minimalism as I find my way to what works best for me. I will be curious to read how this feels for you in future posts. Wishing you a wonderful year.
Thank you for putting into words what so many of us are feeling.