Unplugging – At Least To Some Extent

Over the weekend I listened to a nice message at church just about interacting with people, being available, demonstrating love by helping people. The topic came to social media, and it reminds me of what NYT Bestselling Author Ted Dekker said once: “Social media is for 3 things: to attack, to defend, and to promote. Nothing else.”

Keeping that in mind, there’s some objectives that can be obtained by attacking and defending, but it’s all too easy to get sucked into a pattern of fighting that’s unhealthy, doesn’t actually help anything, and is very meaningless at the end of the day — as what’s it done to impact anyone’s actual lives?

Most fighting seems to come down to politics, and I haven’t seen a social media argument where it’s convinced one person one way or another. In fact, there seems to be an inverse relationship between people convinced and lengthy twitter arguments. It just gets people to tune out and mad at each other.

And I’ve found that’s a waste of time.

So what I’ve done, is I’ve actually removed the Twitter and Facebook apps on my phone. FEAR NOT! It doesn’t mean I’m going to stop posting memes and being funny, or even stop some zingers occasionally — but those are all with the intention of fun and funny — and I’m certainly not going to stop promoting my books. But I want to only have these apps in a contained environment where I specifically WANT to use them, not scroll through and look at the drama over the course of the day. I have a special app for DMs and the like so i can talk to people one on one.

I’ll check back in a week or two to see how this 1. impacts relationships with people and 2. helps me focus on work. Maybe it’s a good idea for you too, only way to know is to try it.  If you do make it off social media, check out my book, The Blood Of Giants in that newfound free time. It’s by far my best book yet and book 3 is going to be coming out in a few weeks!