Almost a year ago, I made the deci­sion to opt out of social media. A lot of peo­ple have asked about my expe­ri­ence being off of social media, while oth­ers just look at me like I’m crazy and don’t ask.

In a nut­shell, the expe­ri­ence has been both lib­er­at­ing and frustrating.

The feel­ing of lib­er­a­tion was prob­a­bly strongest when I first shut down my social media accounts. I enjoyed not check­ing in and scrolling through time­lines. My mind was much clearer, and I believe that I became more focused — at work as well as when I was out with fam­ily and friends. My atten­tion, and my eyes, stayed on the per­son in that was in front of me or on the phone. I have read more books in the last year that I have in the pre­vi­ous 10. I started a prac­tice of sup­ple­ment­ing my online notes with hand-written notes in small pocket note­books. I recon­nected with the daily habit of read­ing the paper. I have become much more delib­er­ate, or thought­ful?, about what, and with whom, I share specifics about my life. I didn’t have to worry about select­ing a fil­ter, cir­cle, or group.

The frus­trat­ing part of being off of social media is the rather pre­cip­i­tous, and imme­di­ate, drop in my knowl­edge of what’s hap­pen­ing with my friends and fam­ily. For bet­ter or worse, a lot of peo­ple use social media like a phone, email, or let­ter. It is the default means of com­mu­ni­ca­tion and shar­ing for a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of peo­ple that I care about. Another source of frus­tra­tion is the incred­i­ble level that social media is inte­grated into just about every­thing on the web and phys­i­cal day-to-day life. Want more infor­ma­tion about a restau­rant or food truck? That info is only avail­able on Twit­ter or Face­book. Want to com­ment on an inter­est­ing arti­cle or blog piece? A num­ber of sites and blogs are adopt­ing Facebook’s com­ment­ing sys­tem. (I have only notice a hand­ful of sites that have started to use Google’s bur­geon­ing com­ment­ing sys­tem.) Though not a social media ser­vice, the strug­gle to be social media free is anal­o­gous to my fight to use Spring­pad as my go-to online mem­ory site/app/service. As much as I love the fea­tures built into Spring­pad, Ever­note is every­where, and more peo­ple use it. An ever-increasing num­ber of web­sites and apps are offer­ing Ever­note integration.

So…does the ubiq­uity of social media mean that I can’t func­tion? Quite to con­trary. I have had a won­der­ful year off of social media, and I would be happy to talk to, and encour­age, any­one con­tem­plat­ing pulling that prover­bial plug. Just as I said in my piece a year ago, as well as my blog pieces on cable (men­tal note: I need to write an update about that.), dis­con­nect­ing is not for every­one, and I think that you need to think about the pros and cons of “dis­ap­pear­ing.” To hear some of my friends talk, you would think that I was relo­cated to a dis­tant moon of Jupiter.

The free men­tal space cre­ated by my social media hia­tus has [mostly] clar­i­fied, as I dis­cussed pre­vi­ously, that social media was not the prob­lem. The issues started and end with me. Social media cer­tainly can play a role in one becom­ing dis­tracted and dis­con­nected, iron­i­cally, from gen­uine engage­ment with oth­ers. Some become so obsessed with shar­ing that they aren’t truly in the moment they shar­ing with oth­ers. I never fell into that camp, but I think the fear of becom­ing that per­son scared me off.

Over the last cou­ple of weeks, I have started to think about my deci­sion to opt out of social media, as well as cut­ting the cord (cable), and some other rather absolute stances on a vari­ety of issues. I have slowly come to real­iza­tion that I have a his­tory, going back to my teenage years, of being a pretty stark, all-or-nothing per­son about cer­tain things. Ok…a num­ber of things. I’ve been all-or-nothing with peo­ple. I’ve been all-or-nothing with pur­suit of per­sonal and pro­fes­sional inter­ests. A lot of these all-in, or all-out deci­sions have not played out well in the long run. I can’t say that there’s been any­thing all that dra­matic, but I sus­pect that I have sold some poten­tial, mean­ing­ful friend­ships short because I didn’t have patience for the bull­shit of the moment. That’s an issue that I con­tinue to work on.

I think bal­ance is the key word. I have worked on learn­ing how to pid­dle around with the things that inter­est me, but also sum­mon and main­tain­ing suf­fi­cient focus while at work, with fam­ily or friend, and the times in between. It is very impor­tant, to me, to be more present, and not con­stantly drift­ing off into the “what’s next?”

With that said, and you some of you may have picked up on the iner­tia of this piece, I am opt­ing back into social media.

I am sure that there will be an ini­tial splash of activ­ity, but it is my hope that this time around I can approach social media with­out an all-or-nothing stance. We’ll see.

Here’s where you can find me: