About the Book

Near the end of 2019, I started a personal experiment with social media, which sparked my curiosity about its effects on mental health and overall life satisfaction. I spent the next several years researching, self-experimenting with, and observing topics like screen-life balance, digital minimalism, tech addiction, and intentional living. I shared what I was learning on a blog, then shifted to organizing my work into a book. I discovered a gap in the digital minimalism books on the market. They felt too extreme or too theoretical. I wanted to create something that felt lived-in and achievable. 

The book opens with my personal struggles to move from digital overwhelm to living with intentionality. Through a series of "unfollows" readers are guided through 22 chapters, each focused on a specific digital-age challenge. Each chapter weaves in my own anecdotes, practical experiments, and "Protect Simplicity" action steps (140 in total that can be implemented right away). 

Below are samples from the book to help you get a glimpse:

Table of Contents Sample

• Preface: A Season of Clarity
• Unfollow Scrolling-Induced Depression
• Unfollow Neglecting Your Personal Values
• Unfollow Refusing to Embrace Discomfort
• Unfollow Adding Before Subtracting
• Unfollow Filling Up on Digital Candy
• Unfollow Validation Addiction
• Unfollow Buying It
• Unfollow Family Disruptions
• Unfollow Digital Clutter

Chapter Sample

Introduction

“I Just Don’t Like this Weirdo Aspect of the World”

My experimentation with social media follows the path of most people who watched it unfold in real time in the late nineties. It began with AOL email and Instant Messenger. Then I joined MySpace (in 2003) and Facebook (in 2004) along with the others. Right on track, I dropped MySpace and kept Facebook. Next was adding millions of photos to Facebook and organizing them into albums that displayed a life well-lived. I eagerly added old friends and shamelessly spied on exes. But one day it stopped being fun. However, it wasn't until years later that I took my first break from the platform.

Joining in on the social media craze was hard to avoid. It wasn’t long before I felt it might not be for me. I pretended it was, though, ignoring my instincts so I could keep with the status quo. I promptly followed the tech habits of the majority: posting, liking, checking, staring, scrolling, stalking. Fearful my existence would be null if I didn’t share my cool life experiences, I posted incessantly. It easily grew into a habit from the validation and dopamine boosts alone. The onset of Facebook is when my “research” actually began. I recall the moment I felt affected after being on these sites and wanted to know why. I’d often ask friends about their feelings toward social media. More often than not, we had similar annoyances and felt confusion regarding our draw toward it. Like many, in between feelings of guilt and missing out, I convinced myself that I needed to be online. In staying with the trends, I joined the next popular platform, Instagram, in 2010.

The natural progression was to influence. As a seasoned teacher, co-owner of a fitness center, singer, visual artist, and certifiable #fitmom, I at least felt credentialed for the role. I posted more often and displayed the things I did in shiny, perfected photos. Spending time doing this was the experience I needed to learn from. I quit pretty soon. Maybe I could have been successful with it, but it just felt wrong. Having to allocate so much time online didn’t seem very influence-worthy.Inspiring others with a pretend-perfect life only took away from being present in my real one. It made me less of a parent, family member, and human being, in the real world. The trade-off didn’t seem worth any success it might amount to. After a few trials to maintain a presence, I found that platform didn’t work for me either.

Growing increasingly skeptical and wary, I bounced between platforms, searching for any value they could provide. But a visceral gloom came over me whenever I jumped online, and I knew it was time to rethink things. I’m not one to allow toxins in my life once I identify them as such. I don’t give many chances to those who treat me badly, so I don’t know why I went along as long as I did. I started writing to process the beef I had with the digital world in general. I created a blog so I could share my thoughts in a place on the Web where my words weren’t measured with likes. Once I got started, I couldn’t stop thinking and writing about how there had to be a better way to coexist with the digital world. My thoughts came so fast I could barely get them on the page.

My beef? Years ago, we were thrown into a virtual world and given no tools on how to navigate it. We blindly logged on once and never stopped. Introspection and common sense seemed to go out the window. Strength in numbers took over, and a new mindset developed: If everyone else is doing it, I’m going to as well. One day screens started ruling our days. We were made to run, jump, explore, and play but instead have grown comfortable staring, straining, and sitting. We all started acting, dressing, and living eerily similar to one another. Many, especially young people, started feeling general malaise. Why wouldn’t we? With FOMO, eye strain, and daily social comparison a daily companion, we didn’t stand a chance. We unwittingly take on the habits of others that don’t serve us or, even worse, impact us negatively. I’m just not following why we engage in a virtual world so wholeheartedly.

In observing the world around me, I started to see how we take little notice of the bad habits we’re instilling into children. We are increasingly neglecting the earth we stand on and the people right in front of us. We call photos of our acquaintances making dinner a “newsfeed” and don’t blink an eye at people around us staring 24/7 at a thing we ironically call a smartphone. A thing that infants today no doubt believe their parents love as much as them, if not more. A thing I both love and truly hate. The parent and the educator in me became worried, almost compulsively, about the negative repercussions from careless use of technology.

Peter Attia, M.D., in his book Outlive, said, “Medicine’s biggest failing is in attempting to treat all these conditions at the wrong end of the timescale (after they are entrenched) rather than before they take root. As a result, we ignore important warning signs and miss opportunities to intervene at a point where we still have a chance to beat back these diseases, improve health, and potentially extend lifespan.”1 I couldn’t help but connect this to the importance of paying attention to warning signs, and actual research, when it comes to using technology. I knew this was the time to follow my instincts when they told me to intervene, even when it was uncomfortable to go against the norm.

I started asking questions, observing myself and others without judgment, and researching. This book is my acceptance, or rather my admittance, that coexisting with the entire world on a computer screen bothers me. It is the process of working through that annoyance by learning from what others are doing right, and what we are doing wrong. It is the process of taking what I’m learning to create new rules, habits, and practices to live by. To make it official, I wrote a letter:

Dear Social Media,

I’m coming clean. It’s not you, it’s me. You know how they say a relationship should have more good days than bad? Well, ours has been bothering me for a while now. So it’s time I take a step back.

Best regards,

Emily

I gave up any final efforts to follow along, or to pretend I was content in engaging the same way others were. I began a personal case study to find a way that I could use technology but not let it use me. I knew that the digital world was here to stay. I didn’t want to delete or ignore everything but use technology in a healthier way. People will always post. Many will love it, and I will always like it a little. Overall, there are parts of it that can add value to my life and parts that I knew if I let go, my life would improve.

Blindly following along and joining in the social media craze was jeopardizing my own happiness. Drew Barrymore, in an interview about why she wasn’t on social media, mirrored how I was feeling: “I just don’t like this compulsive, instantaneous, over-information, lack-of-privacy, weirdo aspect of the world.”2 Feeling validated, I used Drew’s words as my mantra:  I just don’t like this weirdo aspect of the world. They would pop into my head every time I compulsively scrolled through social media. I had reasons for not liking it. I was an introvert electing to do more socializing than the real world already provided. I already had dozens of hobbies, a great fitness and nutrition routine, spent time with friends and family, and was raising three active boys, but now I had this additional world to be in. I’ve never enjoyed watching reality TV, yet in scrolling the newsfeeds, I was electing to watch snippets of reality via video clips and photos.

Other technologies other than social media sometimes hindered my contentment as well. In addition to managing three email accounts, I was managing text messages minute by minute. I was even paying to store my digital clutter! Seeing what others were purchasing online increased how much I spent and decreased how good I felt about myself and others. A smartphone at my fingertips made me good at multitasking and bad at being present with the people in front of me. Balancing a real world with a virtual one made me say yes to things, even when my insides were screaming no!

So no, I don’t really like the all-consuming digital aspect of the world. But I know as well as the next person that I have to learn to live with it. I let my life get out of hand because of technology. Identifying that was the first phase. My next one would be to make life good in spite of it. My goal was to have a smartphone, a television, video games, and a laptop but still put life and people first. I was hopeful a final phase could be to make life even better with the use of technology. As a business owner and writer, it could certainly add to those things, so long as I left the riffraff out.

I gained strength for my mission when I found myself having the same conversations with various peer groups. Others were also questioning what was happening in society today and felt they were mindlessly following along without any sense of how to use their values as a guide. I started to learn from those who were living the way I wanted to and to distance myself from the influence of those who weren’t. Once I started working to find a solution, anything I read or researched about self-improvement easily applied to this “problem” I wanted to solve.

There are people who are unfazed by the screen, and those who happily coexist with it. But there are others like me, who are overwhelmed, fatigued, and increasingly discontent. If you are content as is, then you are lucky. If you are like me, then buckle down because we’re going to do some work. This book is a collection of thoughts, wonderings, and ideas for better screen-life balance. It is my process for removing the excess in order to focus on the good stuff. It’s about being intentional with the way I will and won’t spend my time. In identifying what’s working and what’s not, I have figured out better habits, rules, and nonnegotiables. I now use technology so that it doesn’t use me. If you have decided it’s best to unfollow the way things are currently going and to work toward something different, let me be your guide.

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