My journey breaking free from social media as a maker and small business owner

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Transcript

0:01

Hey everyone, this is Kim Biegler coming to you at home in Harrisburg, Oregon. And this episode is a little bit different because I'm going to talk about my journey with getting off social media over the past month or so. And I just thought I'd Thought it would be something interesting to share. Some of you may be thinking you want to get off. Some of you may have gotten off or are just in different stages or could care less in which case this may be less interesting to you, but I just wanted to share my journey. I'm not here to preach about it or to say you should or shouldn't. That's everybody's decision for themselves, but I just wanted to talk about it cause it's not the easiest thing to do. Before I start places you can find me are on my website, youthfulfibrefarm. com. You can always email me through there and I try my darndest to respond. I have a blog, beingyouthful. com, which I have put together. I'm going to double down on and get back on more readily. So that's beingyouthful. com. You can find me on YouTube and you can also find me in the Patreon. Youthful has a Patreon community where you can support what I do here and some of the other education and things that I do online. So everything is in the show notes to find me in all those places. Okay, so like I said, I'm not here to preach. I just kind of wanted to share my journey, let you know that you can do it. It can be done and I'll still be here and we'll all still be in our places. It's just a matter of trying to figure out where those places are off of social media. So, okay. I thought I would start with. the reasons I decided to get off. So I've been feeling like this for a while. I probably got on Facebook maybe 10 or 11 years ago and I had a girls weekend with some friends and they were like, you need to get on Facebook. So I did. I had a business at the time and I think we were on, I can't honestly remember, but the other business I believe was on social, but I didn't do it. I left it to my employees to do. So anyway, they signed me up, blah, blah. When I started this current business. Social media became more important because it was. quote unquote free way to promote my business. And so I started spending more time on there, on Instagram especially. I enjoyed the pretty pictures and all those things that so many of us started for, seeing what other people that I knew were doing or just seeing other people around the world share. Over time it has gotten to be more of a burden as Instagram has changed, you then had to start making reels and it just became a bit more burdensome on my time and energy and creative energy. Like that, this isn't where I had planned to put creative energy was into making social media things. That kind of also my time. Which is, falls into that. But not only the time that I was taking to create things, to, which I love sharing and educating. It wasn't that. It was having to do these short snippets of things to try to grab people's attention. That isn't really my jam. So, And it also was very hard because in theory as a business owner, you want to be there to respond to people. And so you're on there more and then you go down a rabbit hole and then you start streaming and then it just, or streaming, you start scrolling and it just gets further in. So my time was getting wasted on there. My mental health. Definitely was suffering, you know, I didn't really realize it. I, the comments, obviously, like for whatever reason, we all read those negative comments, right. And we get fired up and that affects us to being more negative. And we're certainly around more negativity. I don't think before I got on social media. that I compared myself to others as much, certainly in the business world, I did not do that. You know, obviously you had competitors, but it was different to have competitors versus comparing yourself to other people. And when they're on your feet all the time, it was really easy. Division. So I 100 percent believe that social media has divided us as humans, most definitely in the United States as a country. Let's face it, like they get, they put the most outrageous, It's an inciting comments. They go to the top of the feed. People comment on them. They spend more time on there. We read them and that's how they make advertising money, right? The more time we're on there, the more advertisers are willing to pay into it. So they suck us in, they get us fired up, they get us mad at each other and then that's where we are now. Right? That's where we are. Okay. So finally, Mark Zuckerberg, what can I say? Like when you go on and start talking about how Facebook is not masculine enough anymore, and that you're pulling fact checking and leaving it up to people, I just thought, I'm done. I'm just done. So y'all, it's not easy. I'm not gonna at all say it's easy. I put I put a lot of time and energy into my Instagram account as a business owner. I put a lot of time and energy and it's hard to walk away from that, which is essentially what you have to do, whether you're just doing it as a personal you know, it could be a personal journal of all the things that you've made or something like that. And it's really hard to walk away from. I get that Instagram helped me build my business. There's no doubt about it. I reached a lot more people and. I built a community inside Instagram that hopefully I was able to pull off of Instagram. A lot of them I was, and I'm so grateful for that because I've made friends off of Instagram, certainly, but let's face it, it's not free. I always kind of would think it was free, but it's not. It comes at a cost to all the things I said above. So, but it did help. I met people. I was introduced to businesses. These are all the reasons that it's not easy to be clear. All the perks that I got from Instagram, the people that I met, the businesses that I started following especially a lot of us made us hand sewn us crafted, just different things that I, it would have been harder to find not on Instagram. The community there is certainly. Positive communities on Instagram. A lot of the people in the youthful community were very positive, very supportive. It was rare that I got a negative comment. Okay. FOMO. Oh my God. It's so real. You all the fear of missing out. That was the biggest thing in the first week or so is like, I might not see that product. I might not see that comment. I might not see what that person posted. What's going on in the world? Because I, I had specific news outlet sources that I followed, but that was a way to get news shot at you immediately, right? If you're picking up your phone and going on Instagram throughout the day, you're going to get that like most updated thing. You're also going to get all the comments that come with it, but Okay, and finally, anyway, the phone wall is real. I get it. It's really hard. And it's even hard to like not get the comments when it comes to the things, which is its own thing to be concerned about. And then The cat emojis, right? The cat videos. That was like my world. I loved all those fun cat things. I will say it's got me less inclined to bring another cat into the house though, because I'm less inundated with cat stuff. So that might not be the worst thing. So those are kind of some of the things that made it not easy for me. And I assume for lots of you, it's the same, right? The people, the places, all of those things. Okay. So how did I do it? Right? Finally, I got annoyed enough. and all of it that I said, I can't support these. I can't support Pettit anymore. That's what it came down to for me. So how I hemmed and hawed at first, I slowly tried to get off. Trust me over the year, I have like, I'm only going to go on once a day or, you know, put parameters on, but eventually you kind of fall back into the old routine. So finally what I did was I decided this is happening. I spent some time going through and trying to think of who are the businesses that I like on there. And I would go find them off of Instagram or off of Facebook and join their newsletter. Or save their website page to my computer. I DM'd people so that if there were specific people that I thought, you know, I want to make sure they see this, then, or know that I'm leaving so I can stay connected, I would direct message them. If I didn't direct message you, I'm so sorry. But, that doesn't mean I don't want to hear from you, I promise. It just was overwhelming and a certain point it's like I've got to just get off. I've just got to get off. I did join Blue Sky, although the reality hit me that I didn't want to get on another social media platform, even if it was where all the positive people were. Things were right now. It's just not how I want to spend my time. I added new news apps onto my phone so that I had a different way. I mean, I had some of these on my phone, but I just made a more more concerted effort to have kind of a diverse, source of news that I felt comfortable with was giving true information out. So I added those onto my phone so that throughout the day I can pop onto those apps, see what's going on. And, but it's a more mindful popping on, right? I'm going to go on right now cause I haven't looked in five hours to see what's going on in the world. And goodness knows, Everything could have changed in five hours. Ah, so I put new apps on my phone. And then finally I just said, it's time. I went on, I made a slide in Canva, which Canva is it's free, so you can go in there, you can make slides yourself, it's very user friendly, and I just made a slide saying, I'm getting off, here's where you can find me. I also, and I did it in a carousel in Instagram because I've had decent success with carousel posts lately. So I just put a few pictures from our recent trip. I inserted that slide in there. I said a little comment. I actually turned comments off on my post because I just don't, there's no point. And then I also shared all those things to my stories. And I waited about 24 hours, responded to anybody who responded via stories. And then I got, that was it. And I thought about doing this whole thing, thing, thing for the business, but I decided it's just not where I want to put the energy. I'm done putting time into Instagram and Facebook. That's how it's going to go. I did also over on Facebook put in like the last group event I said, you know, please, I'm getting off of here. So please get to my newsletter. If you want to have updates on events, I may or may not go back onto Facebook here and there to post an event, especially if I have other people coming into the shop and I want to make sure it gets promoted well, but in general not going on there. And then about a week after I did that, I took the apps off my phone because if you are logged into those apps. You're being tracked, right? I mean, you all know it. You go on and you search for something on your phone under whatever browser you're using and then you go on Instagram and you're like, huh, that's so funny. They just posted an ad that relates to what I was just searching for. So if you are logged into those things on your phone, getting tracked, which I didn't like, you know, okay, so that's how I did it. basically down and dirty when it came down to it. And I got off of social and went on other businesses, websites, or other people's, you know, ways to find them. Okay. So here are the perks ready. And some of them are pretty unexpected. I. I'm more well read and informed on the news than I was when I was on social media. This is not a shocker, right? But I think a lot of us, well, I will speak for myself that I would see something, I would click on it, I would go to read the article a little bit and then I get off. Well now I have more specific news apps. I read the articles longer because I have more time. And in general, I just think I'm more well informed and more well rounded on, I'm just seeking out. good sources and reading them and spending more time doing it. And here's what happens when you read an article and then you process it by yourself and then you don't have other people's comments sitting right there for you to read or a byline that just throws you completely off. And then maybe you process it and you go talk about it with your significant other or your friend or whoever. It's a good thing, right? There's no reactions. Like, it's up to you to do your own analysis and decide what you feel about it and then talk to other people about it. And it's a game changer. And at first, it's like, It's a little bit of the FOMO, what would all the millions of people out there have said about this article or like, Oh, sometimes it's nice just to have those people back you. Okay, there's people that are on my side as far as how I feel about this, but when it comes down to it, that's not, that's not how we should process information. So Take that for what it is, right? I'm not comparing myself to others because I'm not constantly bombarded with the others. And I had pulled some people, you know, I kind of had taken a strategy of if I see something and it doesn't make me feel good or it makes me compare myself, then I should not be following that person anymore. It worked to some extent, but you know, it's better just to not be constantly bombarded. Okay. I have so much extra time. And I, by the end, wasn't even on Socials a lot, but I was still on there a lot, right? I still was taking my time up. I still was clicking on there multiple times during the day. I still was button mashing on my phone, and I don't really have anything to button mash anymore, which is pretty amazing. So I'm not on my phone. Guess what I get to do instead? Make more things, knit more things. Connect with people and businesses in other ways. Like I'm getting back to more emails and I had to contact people and say, Hey, I know we've usually reached out versus on Instagram, but now we're going to have to email each other or text each other. Whoa, crazy. So I'm just on my phone a lot less and it gives me time to do other things. Okay. I think those are my main perks. So anyway, that is just a bit of my journey. Here's the thing you all, if you decide, if you've been thinking about it and you, Actually, no, let me run through my final notes before I say that final thing. I am still on YouTube. I did want to point that out. I'm not the biggest fan. I mean there are some issues, right? There are some issues. I have always looked at YouTube as more of an SEO outlet search engine optimization, in case you're wondering. That is kind of a business side of things, but we're on YouTube. My content lasts longer and people can search it and find it. And so I'm more invested in putting my time into that because I know it will be around for a long time. It's not a perfect platform. There's certainly some political things that I'm not aligned with, but at this point until a better platform comes up for it, that is where I am. And you can find me there every week. And I post all about wool. I've gotten off Amazon. We. No longer will be Amazon Prime members. We really don't, what I do on Amazon is a lot of times we just use it as a holding place, like look for the thing you want, save it for later, and then go to the website of that product and buy it there. You know, if there's something you just can't find anywhere else, then that's one thing, but you don't have to be, for us, we didn't need to be paying into Prime anymore. It's, I have heard people say that they don't feel as affected by social media because they have culled their Platform. So, well, right, they've cold so that they're not getting a lot of really negative stuff or they're not getting a lot of just stuff that doesn't make them feel good, which is wonderful. It's so much better for your mental health. But I would also argue that you are still supporting the platforms and they are still making money off of you. If you're on there, they're making money. But that really is for each of us to decide. So my final reminder is you can always jump back on, you know, just because you take it off your phone doesn't mean you can't get back on there. Or if you're sitting one night and you think, Oh my gosh, what was that one company that I loved so much? Jump back on there and go find them. This is up to you. If you decide to do this, you make the rules and that's the big thing, right? You're making the rules instead of being Sort of addicted to this thing that has dragged so many of us in my end notes would be, I am feeling a sense of anger. I'm feeling a sense of embarrassment for our country. I'm so sad to see what's happening and where we are standing in the world. I'm going to continue to speak up. I'm going to continue to educate myself. I'm going to continue to make strong choices about where I spend my money. Where I spend my time in the businesses I support. And I know so many of you feel the same way and it's a struggle right now. And I am here for everybody. I just wanted to share my journey about how it went in case it's something that appeals to you. So in the meantime, Take care of yourself, right? Let's stop being so divided. Let's be kind to everybody around us. As I say on YouTube, we're all neighbors and the more that we can come together, the more we have a chance to be stronger and to say what's happening in our country is not okay. So, and don't forget to vote for goodness sakes. It won't be long. It won't be long till we get to vote again. So don't forget that you can find me on my website, on my blog, on YouTube. You can join the Patreon community if you so desire to support some of the stuff I do. And you can also fill out a Google in my show notes. There is a Google doc that you can make comments and I'm going to go right now and I'm going to read those and I'm going to see if anybody has commented anything lately. So thank you so much for taking the time to listen. And I hope that in some way this helps you, or maybe it doesn't, but maybe you just enjoyed hearing somebody else's voice. Thank you so much for listening. Take care. And I will talk to you all soon. Bye.