By Janny Jackson
Before I get into why I quit social media I want to preface this by saying that all opinions shared here are my own, based off of my experiences and the season of life I am in, and are not at all meant to influence or shame anyone else’s decisions about this matter.
I have had a love/hate relationship with social media since it’s existence. I have never been one to do what everyone else is doing so I always have limited myself with social media use. I never had MySpace, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok and didn’t have Facebook for a very long time. The only one I have been somewhat consistent with was Instagram, and even with that I have had several different accounts that I have started and deleted over the years.
I always seem to get to the point where I’m over it.
In the early years of social media use I wrestled with feelings of comparison, feeling left out, and wanting that perfect life and family that was depicted and shown on my feed daily. I learned pretty quickly that I had to be selective about who I was following and I eventually was able to overcome those feelings.
As of recently I have become more aware of how much I let it consume any down time I had, as well as the need to feel like I had to share what was going on in our lives regularly.
I also got tired of the constant selling and advertising. I get that there are a lot of people that use their platforms for their businesses and have been very successful at it. I’m happy for those people. But I also don’t want to feel like I’m always being asked to buy something that they are promoting instead of seeing their content, which was the reason I followed to begin with.
The best parts about social media include the fact that I have learned A TON from other moms and DIYers. I have also connected with people that I would have never been able to connect with otherwise. There is a lot of GOOD in social media. And I will miss that. But I wrestled more with the things that I do not enjoy about social media. They were just exhausting and mentally draining to the point that it outweighed the good.
I started my Raising Three Marigolds blog and Instagram page because I LOVE talking about homeschool. I did not care about numbers or money. I just wanted others to know more about homeschooling and see that if it is possible for us, it is also possible for them. I truly enjoyed sharing what we were doing and seeing what others were doing in their own homeschool. But the one thing I could not shake, and was the ultimate end all for me, was privacy concerns.
Thankfully I didn’t have any issues with this matter while my page was up, but I didn’t want to get to the point where it did become an issue.
My children and their safety is my top priority above everything and anyone else. Even though I love sharing about what we do in our homeschool, I was not comfortable putting them onto a platform that anyone could access, and not only see them on a public page, but also be exposed to the criticism that some people feel so entitled to give whenever they see something they may not like or agree with.
I prayed about it for a while, and even contemplated finding a way to share about our homeschool journey without using their faces, but it just didn’t seem like it would work and felt like more work, because my kids are a big part of my day and obviously the reason I homeschool. We are always together.
Another big concern was the filming aspect. The last thing I want to do is interrupt our school day with filming, or feeling like I had to make things look a certain way for a video or picture. That’s exhausting and not real life and I don’t do fake.
Though my kids did not object to it all they also did not consent to it, and are not able to give true consent because of their ages.
I refuse to use my children for any kind of gain whether it be popularity or financial. Even though that was not my goal in it all, I did not even want to get to the point where that was even an option, so I shut it all down.
I am still active on Pinterest, where I get a lot of fun ideas for homeschooling and home design, but that’s about it for now. Will I be back? Not for the foreseeable future. I am happily enjoying being ignorant to what is happening in the social media world. I feel free from the concerns of our privacy and the criticism of others. I’m also not distracted on my phone nearly as much as I was.
Having left social media feels freeing. I no longer feel like I have to check my feeds and be up to date with what is ‘supposedly’ happening in people’s lives that I don’t even know. It gives me more time to focus, truly focus, on the people I have in front of me, and that is what is most important to me.
What are your thoughts? Would you quit social media? Why or why not?
Let me know below. And as always, thanks for being here!