Social Media Burnt Out
I had to admit to myself this morning that I’m feeling a bit burnt out.
I’m not burnt out on homemaking. I don’t think that will ever happen. There is far too much to do, and learn, and too many skills to develop. There are always more things to dig deeper into. Home, my home, is still my favorite place to be. I still love making it more and more safe, comfortable, and supportive of my husband and my people. I still love welcoming others in and seeking to provide them with some coziness. I love being the manager of a “soft place to land.” I love the pace of homemaking. I love my home and being the creator of my home. I’m not burnt out on homemaking. Having just finished Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes, I love it even more. His description of Mellas’ desire for warm femininity after the horror of war made me want to lean even harder into it. It revived me and reminded me of the importance of my work.
I’m not burnt out on homemaking.
I’m burnt out on Social Media.
Several different factors have come into play that have pushed me to get off social media: a desire to establish boundaries, which drove me to shut off many of my notifications; the destruction of my attention span because of an addiction to shorts and reels; a sense of the waste of time that is doom-scrolling; accepting my finiteness, and not wanting every moment of my life to be an argument; the vapid emptiness of fandoms and how they were destroying my love of my particular characters and stories (largely through the unending push to make everyone and everything about sex). This list brought the burden I’d been carrying into the light. It had come on so slowly, a new account here, a new account there, just a few more minutes, just one more post, one more picture. If you want to be seen, if you want to be found, if you want to be successful or profitable, one more account. Or even, if you want to keep up with your family, if you want to stay connected with friends, if you want to be included, one more app. It had all become so heavy.
Since 2020, I’ve been untangling myself from social media. Each time I disengaged from something, my life brightened and my soul calmed down. I didn’t stop cold turkey; I undid things in layers. First, the notifications. No one should be available 24/7. Even kids need boundaries from their parents, and mothers from their children. If this is true about our people, how much more so is it for strangers? And work. We should never be available to clients, customers, and bosses all the time. Each time I shut off notifications, I had to handle withdrawals. Each time I’ve closed an account or deleted an app, I’ve had to power through withdrawals. That, more than anything, has opened my eyes to the addiction of shorts, reels, and feeds.
Homemaker Chic’s constant push to grow myself and do the hard things has been a tremendous encouragement as I’ve unplugged. I remind myself in my best Shaye and Angela voice to go pick up a book, read an article, watch something that requires my brain to work, even if it is just for 30 minutes. It is a lot like working out. If you haven’t exercised in a long time, it will take time to retrain your body. Our brains are the same. It takes time to get them trained to engage more deeply.
Side Note: One of the things I’m using to exercise my brain is reading more classics. I try to make stops throughout my day to read. Mornings are theology and military, afternoons are poetry and homemaking, and evenings are classics. Each of these breaks is about 30 minutes. I want to be able to hold onto a conversation, a flow of thought, with big words and big paragraphs. I don’t want to be spoon-fed sugar all the time. (Lest you think I’m something I’m not, I am also watching Big Bang Theory for the second time. Talk about spoon-fed sugar.)
This sorta backfired on me recently as these things tend to do. I’m now the crotchety old bog hag who doesn’t want to be on social media even for HearthKeepers. I don’t want to be on Instagram talking about homemaking. We’ve closed account after account as we’ve moved along, adjusting to the ebb and flow of the group and the culture as a whole. Instagram is the last major social media platform HearthKeepers has. I’ve never been less interested in engaging there. It feels tedious, boring, false, and encourages a certain level of mindlessness that I’ve actively been trying to escape. I’m thankful to know that homemaking has become so broad. It wasn’t that way in 2017 when I started looking for other homemakers. But I find being a content creator dulls my soul. It makes me think of my life and my home from a sharing standpoint. It encourages me to constantly meme my life.
For example, Oxford and Orion, my two crows, come and visit the chicken yard for scraps every morning once I head inside. The other day, I noticed a third crow. His name is now Bodleian. After I watched them for a few days, I realized he was younger, not quite the dark glossy black of Oxford and Orion. Then it hit me. They’d brought their child to my chicken yard. I now had a crow family. I was so excited. And my brain was like, quick, write something cute and cozy so you can post it in your Substack notes!
No. No. No. Just enjoy. Breathe in the next crow generation learning to come eat out of your yard, and thank the Lord for this little bit of delight in your morning. You don’t need to share it.
As I got away from social media, I got more and more burnt out about social media. How am I getting more burnt out doing less? Is getting over the dopamine addiction to being noticed? I’m used to having my fingers in several different ‘pies’ that let me interact with the internet. I’ve grown used to likes, hearts, and such. Now that I’m not really on social media, I’m not getting that little rush that says someone liked what I had to say. I’ve pulled back to things that cost people: podcasts and blog articles. These aren’t short and quick for the listener/reader or for the writer/producer. They require time and thought.
But what do I do with this burnout?
The first thing I did was talk to Sarah. She’s not only my HearthKeeper co-administrator but my dear friend who is insightful and clear. She saw my burnout as a burden that needed sharing and offered to be more engaged with Instagram. This helped me feel less isolated. Working on a project together helps us keep each other excited. She also didn’t let me off the hook. She didn’t let me quit Instagram, which is what I wanted her to do; she offered to help bear the burden in a way that was manageable to us both but didn’t let me escape.
The second thing I did was write. Writing is how I process thoughts and emotions. It’s how I step outside of my noisy brain and make sense of it all. It is often how I preach to myself the truth I need to hear when I can’t feel anything but chaos. I wrote about all the burnout I was feeling and all the frustrations and sins and pride and fear. I wrote it out of my heart and onto the page. This allowed me to step back and regain a proper golden mean (the proper life tension that holds us in the middle).
Next, and most importantly, I carried on. Duty and faithfulness aren’t virtues often spoken of in our culture. Faithfulness, day in and day out being there, is boring. Duty is degrading. But when burnout comes, whether it is a heavy sadness or a numbness, a disconnect from the world and our work, we don’t quit. We remember that feelings or no, this is our duty. We stay faithful. So. When I felt burnout because of social media, I started to withdraw, but when that burnout threatened our wonderful group, I asked for help, and I stayed the course. I required myself to push through and not give the burnout too much weight. It’s not a sign from on high that I’ve made a wrong choice. Feelings, or the lack thereof, aren’t infallible or even reliable. I just need to push through this aspect of my burnout until my brain can regain some normal reactions. If I long for longer articles, deeper and more developed thoughts over memes or ten-minute podcast episodes, if I want to learn not to scroll, maybe others do too. I just need to patiently wait to find those people.
Lastly, all this led me to ask myself, what is my goal with HearthKeepers?
When I first started, it was to build a community engaged in studying the domestic arts, being purposeful and intentional to understand the methods and results involved, and then to cultivate a place for the next generation to learn. This is still where my heart is. This hasn’t changed. Sometimes we combat burnout by returning to our foundations. I need to carry on. I need to be faithful even if it is only faithful to a handful of other women. I need to just be faithful where the Lord has put me and trust Him to do what is best with HearthKeepers. I don’t need to be a “successful” content creator with thousands of followers, nor do I need to throw in the towel. I just need to keep social media in the right place and not let it take over my life. I need to continue to produce for HearthKeepers on a balanced level. To do this, I need to remember my goals.
Social media isn’t evil, but it can be a burden that can suck the light right out of our lives without us even noticing it, one dopamine hit at a time. I think each of us needs to find our own level of engagement. What works for us? I think we all need to be aware of the addictive nature of feeds, reels, and shorts, of “being connected” that dulls our minds and hearts and souls. But most of all, we need to learn to love faithfulness and duty as that which lights the way forward when we’re in the dark.
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