Over the years, I've been off and on with social media ... mostly off. In January of this year -- on the advice of some people I highly respect -- I committed to reengage with Facebook (my platform of choice), to help build the work of Renewed Man and Renewed Marriage. Some of your readers of this newsletter might have noticed this change.

Well ... for reasons I will outline later, I have decided to step back from social media and put my energies into this newsletter and another forum for publishing my articles. I'm not going to go crazy, deleting Facebook or anything like that, but I'm stepping back from it. 

Why Am I Telling You This? Because of What I'll be Doing Instead

I'm going to do two things to expand my work instead of engaging with social media. My hope is that these changes will be MORE HELPFUL FOR YOU.

(1) I'm going to place more emphasis on building this newsletter. I'm going to experiment with sometimes sending it out twice a week, and I will make the following commitments:

(a) I'll make it more readable and usable for you. I will try as hard as I can to NOT waste your time. 

(b) I will include the kind of updates that I normally would place into social media in these newsletters. I intend to make the newsletter a place where you can catch updates if you want. 

There will always be a table of contents, so if you don't care about that, you can skip it. :-)

My request is that if you think the info is helpful, I would love for you to send it to others. It's harder for emails to go viral than social media posts ... so if something is helpful for you, please feel free to share it!

(2) I'm going to take ALL the content I've written in this newsletter over the years and make (the good) articles available in one place

Where? You ask. How? You ask. I hope to share the details of this next week. I'm still in the process of building stage 1 of this forum, but I'll let you know when I'm ready to open it up (hopefully that will be within a week or two). 

Did you know that I've written articles in this newsletter every week, and I have these newsletters going back to 2013? That's over 500 articles! I'm not sure that all of them are usable, but hopefully many will be. We'll see. More info to come!

If social media could be helpful to get my message out ... then why am I stepping back from it?

(What follows is just my own personal experience ... feel free to skip this if you're not interested.)

Bottom line: It seems that the more I engage with social media, the less happy, healthy, and productive I am. I wish this wasn't the case, but it is. 

I keep running into four problems. While my focus has been with Facebook, I suspect I'd run into these on other platforms as well. 

 
1. Sexually provocative content

I really work to reduce my exposure to sexually provocative material, and I've noticed this content showing up even on supposedly "family friendly" Facebook. Over time, I have "tuned" my Facebook feed, ads, and video reels -- through its algorithms -- to show me less and less of that stuff, but things still show up once in a while, and I really don't need to see it.

2. Annoying -- and sometimes triggering -- rants about politics and social issues

The same thing is true with peoples' drama and toxic political rants. Even though I keep working on staying away from this -- by unfollowing people, and not engaging with this kind of thing -- I still encounter some, and I really don't need to see it.

3. How it tweaks my lower nature

I'm not proud of this, but I feel okay about admitting it, because the research says I'm not alone in it: social media tweaks the lowest parts of my nature -- especially my jealousy and insecurity. My feed is filled with the "highlight reels" of everybody else's life. Even though they don't intend this, over time instead of just feeling happy for them, I mostly just start to feel left out. Instead of helping me nurture gratitude for the many blessings in my own life, I'm confronted by everybody else's amazing lives (and families, and ministries, and vacations, and homes, and, and ...) and then my own life starts to look boring, problematic, or less fulfilling than theirs. 

But it gets worse: Facebook loves to show me ads, and since I write about marriage and men's programs, Facebook has now decided to show me every single OTHER marriage and men's program on the face of the earth. My feed is so filled with ads for other programs that it leaves me thinking -- in the back of my head -- "Why do I even bother to put my work out there when there's all these other amazing programs?" 

Now intellectually, I KNOW there is plenty of room for my work, that I have a unique contribution, and a connection to some people that allows me to reach them when other programs won't. I know this intellectually, but it gets old having to go over this again and again in my own head and heart every few days.

But here's the final straw -- and the biggest issue:

4. Social media sucks me in, and causes me to waste too much time

I suppose it only makes sense. There's a mind-boggling amount of money to be made by these companies to capture and keep our attention, so they employ EVERY strategy known to man in order to keep us scrolling. 

And it works! On me, at least. 

I can sit down to write a post, giving myself 20 minutes on my calendar to do the task. But then, after I've done my writing, I can't resist scrolling, and looking at what other people are doing. Another 20 minutes -- or more -- goes by! I can sit down and decide I'm going to watch reels for "a couple minutes" ... and I look up and discover that an hour has passed.

I don't have time for this. I'm trying to do good work at our church, and then do writing and speaking and coaching with other men and couples outside our church. In order to do this I must be VERY focused. I want to live with balance: with time for doing my work, but also time for rest, time with friends, time with family, time outdoors (and not in my house or office looking at screens), and time building physical fitness.

If social media bleeds into my work -- or any of these other things -- then I'm in trouble. Spoiler alert: Yes ... turns out it DOES bleed into those other things.

Please understand -- I'm not trying to make YOU feel bad about your social media use. 

I'm not suggesting that anybody else do what I'm doing. This is not an anti-social media rant, even though it might sound like it. It's just that a rant about social media IN MY LIFE. As the saying goes, "Your mileage may vary."

(NOTE: full disclosure, I did find a fair bit of research about the downsides of social media use for peoples' mental health, and this has factored into my decision. If interested, check out the work of sociologist Jonathan Haidt, and productivity writer Cal Newport.)