Social Media Fast: Week 1

The world has somehow continued to revolve, despite five days without digital one-liners from me.  Who would’ve thought?

The kickoff of my fast was overshadowed by my spending the majority of the week with a terrifically rotten stomach bug. Monday’s holiday began with a lovely few hours working out but ended with a fever and an extreme antipathy toward anything except being flat on my back, motionless, avoiding any thought of food.

Note to self: withdrawal happens after you give something up. Get it straight next time.  (It did make the Ash Wednesday fast the easiest one I’ve ever done.) But now that I’m better, what’s going on without Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn?

First, proactively – what I didn’t do. There have been links I wanted to publish; comments I would’ve made; conversations I wanted to have; and advice and recommendations I wanted to put before my Twitter and Facebook brain trusts. But, of course, none of that happened.

Then the reactive side – what I haven’t gotten? Well, it’s impossible to know what I’ve missed. I’m sure there’s a great deal, but I can’t say how big of a deal it is.

And third, what else do I notice? I do think I’m focusing more on human interactions. But I think that it’s for different reasons than you might think.

You’d probably assume that it’d be because social networking had been substituting for phone or email or in-person conversations. Maybe that’s a small part of it, but I don’t think it’s really why.

A larger part may be that there are fewer stimuli draining me all day, so I’ve got the mental energy left. Again, that might be part of the reason, but it’s not the whole thing.

The largest and most important reason, I think, is because the point of Lent is to improve as a Christian. A big part of that for me is to listen more to God.

And if you’re really engaged in listening to Him, you can’t help but have the trickle-down effect of listening more to people – who are God’s image and often speak what God wants us to hear.

So that’s what I think is going on. It’s tremendously encouraging and I’m excited to see how that progresses.

What are you giving up, and how’s it going for you?

(Oh, PS, extra props to the StayFocusd extension, whose wise little blue clock icon is a nice reminder. I haven’t slipped, but it’s comforting to know there’s a guard on duty. I suspect I’ll extend its timer to give me daily limits when I’m done with this and try that experiment for a while.)