In Greek mythology, The Odyssey tells the story of a man, Odysseus, making a decade-long journey to return home to his family. Along the way, he and his team come across many obstacles and come up with plans to get past them. For example, Odysseus and his team encounter sirens at sea—beings who sing beautifully. Anyone who listens to a siren’s song feels compelled to steer toward them, towards shipwreck.

While Odysseus wants to listen to this song, he doesn’t want to give his life up for it. He puts wax in his team’s ears, so they won’t be able to hear the song as they navigate the sea. He also has them bind him to a mast. Odysseus can listen and can’t move—which means he won’t be able to influence where the ship goes. With this approach, Odysseus and his team are able to make it past the sirens, while he also gets to listen to the song. The plan works, they survive, and Odysseus eventually makes it home.

Social media is a siren song. Meta, Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn, and Reddit hire the smartest people in the world to compose and sing these songs. Social media is so enticing that willpower or self-control aren’t useful against it. Companies have created systems that stack the deck in their own favor, at your expense if you use it.

Over a decade ago, I’d already reached a breaking point with social media. I enjoyed using it, I knew it would support my career, and I also felt its pain. In other words, I didn’t want to delete my accounts, and I couldn’t allow it unfettered into my life. I wondered how I could find balance in the metaphor—or digital equivalent—of tying my hands like Odysseus did, so I couldn’t access social media all the time. I was looking for something—anything—that would enable me to practice restraint.

I was a student, and the pain I felt most was procrastinating. I would check Facebook “for 5 minutes,” and before I knew it, an hour had gone by. I couldn’t afford to keep doing this. The first, simple, guideline I set for myself was not checking Facebook until 6PM. It would become a treat, after a day’s work. After I publicly wrote about it, my friends helped keep me accountable by teasing me when they saw me on Facebook during the day.

I was catching with a couple of friends recently, when our conversation drifted to mobile phones and social media. One of them told me they couldn’t even watch a movie—let alone read a book—without checking their phone several times, or at least experiencing a craving to do so. Another had mentioned that it felt like their hands had muscle memory of sorts—that they would be waiting for an elevator or something, and the next thing they knew, their thumb was scrolling Instagram. 

They noted how unusual it was that I lived my life relatively distant from social media, and didn’t check my phone as often. They encouraged me to keep going. 

It made me consider that the mindset and tactics might be more useful than I thought, so I wanted to share:

Friends

I prefer to keep up with friends the old fashioned way—in-person, on calls, or through text messages. My thought is social media can create a veneer of friendship, or a very surface-level connection. I don’t like that. When I miss someone, I also experience a surge of motivation to reach out and make plans with them. That way, we get to catch up for an hour or two and go deep. I feel like I actually get to know my friends better, instead of just knowing more about them. It’s a subtle difference, and it’s important to me. 

There are a lot of people that I’ve fallen out of touch with, of course, and I would like to be friends again as well. No doubt social media would make it easier for us to keep up. This helps me tell a new, more useful, story: that even if we’ve fallen out of touch, we’re still friends. And perhaps I need to accept there are different seasons for different friends. 

Work

For the most part, I think about social media as a work commitment. I treat it accordingly. LinkedIn is my main social network, as I write this. When I don’t have any professional engagements—including book promotions, consulting, etc.—it is not unusual for me to go a week or more without. I often ask my connections to take the conversation to email or mobile, where I am much more responsive.

I am not the most responsive person in the world, though I do get around to most messages in a couple of days.

Low dosage

Social media has only become more alluring, so it’s my responsibility to access it in low-dosage ways. I only check social media through a browser. I installed Leechblock to block different websites at different intervals. I do not have access to the usual social media websites from 9pm–10am, or on the weekends. 

I do have social media apps on my phone, and I stay logged out. This means they don’t send me notifications, and I can still access them if there’s a need for work. (e.g., LinkedIn app at events, etc.)

I set a calendar invite on weekends that says, “Freedom from social,” just as a reminder that denying a craving to check social media creates the possibility to be present and spontaneous.