A few months ago, I closed all my social media accounts. My phone informed me that I spent an average of four hours a day browsing the internet. Four hours. This was embarrassing and shameful–what a total time waster. When I thought about a person of my advanced age wasting that much time, I tried to analyze what we Boomers want from social media.
Many of us apparently believe that all of the people who look at our posts on, for example, Instagram, want to see what we are eating. In restaurants, we take pics of our dinner and post those, thinking that perhaps Aunt Ida in Nebraska would love looking at that fried chicken and slaw. Seriously, how many shots of entrees have you seen on Facebook?
The photo above is one I actually posted on Instagram. Egg salad. What was I thinking? Who would care about my egg salad? Would it generate “likes?” (Nobody “liked” it.) My husband liked it for lunch. That was it.
Others of us old timers are convinced that the world needs to see our vacation photos. Fred standing in front of the Eiffel Tower, or Jeannine getting ready to eat clams in Cape Cod. Really–as a person who had to sit through endless slide shows of my in-law’s trips abroad, I have never understood this. Absolutely nobody who has watched Rick Steves really cares about your vacation shots.
Oh my gosh. Grandchildren. Here is the thing: the only grandchildren I want to watch grow up are mine. And nobody else on the planet cares how tall my grandson is getting. So all those cheerleader posts on Facebook are wasted on anybody that isn’t a close blood relative. But grandchild photos abound on SM (which I learned just last month means “social media,” and not sado-you know what).
I understand that teens spend nearly as much time as I used to on Social Media. But they like to make TikToks about makeup, gymnastics, and doing the choreography to Taylor Swift’s latest songs. This was shocking for me to realize that my scrolling for posts of other folk’s dinners and shots taken from the balconies of cruise ships consumed the same amount of time that teens spend looking at makeup demos and skateboarding tricks.
So, in one fell swoop, I deleted all of my accounts. It was hard at first; I reached for my iPhone for no reason. I felt a little frustrated that I no longer had any reason to take photos of my cat or my latest pedicure. I had all that free time suddenly. I began to fill my empty hours with television crime shows: it’s always the spouse. So then I started doing more exercising. This has caused an increase in in my visits to the chiropractor. But one benefit of doing all these Bird Dogs and Planks is that I no longer have to worry about falling and not being able to get up.
Are you still on Facebook? Well, get OFF.
